Canada not doing enough

In Canada, Action Plan 2000 earmarked $210 million in government funding to promote technologies that reduced greenhouse gas emissions in industry and transportation and gave $125 million to cities to encourage use of such technologies.  Another $100 million went to promote foreign demand for these Canadian solutions.  Despite these efforts, Canadas greenhouse gas emissions in 2002 were the highest ever.  This puts Canada well off the mark of reducing emissions by 5.2 per cent from 1990 levels as called for in the Kyoto Protocol.

 We seriously underestimated the difficulty of getting reductions and overestimated the payoff from new technologies, said a senior official working on climate change.  Nevertheless, last month the Canadian federal budget allocated $1 billion more to support new environmental technologies.  Ottawa is also offering the one ton challenge, in which it calls on individual Canadians to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by one ton.  (Toronto Star,  April 5 and 6).