Environmental train wreck
Nowadays, working as an environmental reporter can be like watching a train wreck in slow motion: you see the catastrophe laid out before you, you know how the catastrophe will unfold and, sure enough, there it happens, exactly as expected. All that’s left to do is document the details.
This, at any event, is how I feel about climate change. Of course I hope I’m wrong, but watching the doublespeak, disingenuousness, ass-covering and straight-out lying coming from our politicians, I can’t help but be more than a wee bit cynical.
I’ve been over this many times before, but I’ll use the release of this year’s Climate Change Action Report Card to once again document the duplicity, failures, and lack of leadership from our business and political betters. They evidently don’t give a damn about this stuff, but maybe the citizenry will get engaged and enraged enough to throw the whole lot out and bring in people who might actually avert the looming catastrophe. Failing that, maybe some random grad student 50 years from now will take a passing interest in the ugly details that led to her ruined planet. So here goes, again, for what it’s worth:
We start in 2001, when the governors of the New England states and the premiers of the Eastern Canadian provinces (NEG/ECP) got together and signed the Climate Change Action Plan. This was celebrated as a responsible move on the part of state and provincial leaders whose federal governments were doing absolutely nothing to address climate change: the U.S. hadn’t signed the Kyoto Protocol and had elected climate change denier George Bush as president, and while Canada had signed the agreement, the governing Liberals under Jean Chrétien had taken no concrete action to meet the terms of the agreement.
So those responsible leaders took it upon themselves. They took the best science available to them and the recommendations of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and made them part of the Climate Change Action Plan they signed onto. That agreement spelled out specific targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as follows:
- By 2010- reduce regional GHG emissions to 1990 levels
- By 2020- reduce regional GHG emission by at least 10 percent below 1990 levels
- In the “long term”- reduce regional GHG emissions by 75 – 85 percent below 1990 levels.
Lots of accolades were issued, the pols got their enviro credential cards punched, and the less cynical segments of the populace felt that something was being done about climate change.
But environmentalists knew better than to simply take the pols on their word. So, a coalition of environmental organizations spread across New England and Eastern Canada have been tracking what progress has been made to meet the lofty goals announced back in 2001. Each year the groups issue a collective “report card” for the region, and individual groups rate their individual states and provinces in terms of how they’ve progressed towards meeting the targets established by the 2001 Climate Change Action Plan.
The latest report card, using the simple A to F grading scheme that we all know from grade school, came out yesterday. Here’s the score of each state and province for how they are doing in meeting the 2010 target:
Connecticut- D
Maine- F
Massacusetts- C
New Hampshire- F
Rhode Island- F
Vermont- F
New Brunswick- F
Newfoundland and Labrador- D
Nova Scotia- F
Prince Edward Island- D
Quebec- D
Remember that the target agreed to for 2010 was a for GHG emissions to be reduced back to 1990 levels. The governments had nine years from the time they signed the agreement to achieve this goal, and we’re now just two years away from the target date. It’s of some pressing concern, then, as to where GHG emissions are today. American data aren't as complete as Canadian data (as a signatory to Kyoto, Canada has to publish a comprehensive GHG inventory), but here’s what the report card details(from page 10 of the report):
| State | 1990 Emissions |
2002 Emissions |
2004 Emissions |
% change from 1990 |
| Connecticut | 41 |
40 |
45 |
+ 0 - 9 % |
| Maine | 19 |
23 |
23 |
+ 20 - 22 % |
| Massachusetts | 84 |
83 |
83 |
0 % |
| New Hampshire | 15 |
18 |
22 |
+ 19 - 49 % |
| Rhode Island | 9 |
12 |
11 |
+ 23 - 32 % |
| Vermont | 5 |
6 |
7 |
+ 16 - 28 % |
| Province | 1990 Emissions |
2000 Emissions |
2005 Emissions |
% change from 1990 |
| New Brunswick | 16.2 |
20.4 |
21.3 |
+ 31.3 % |
| Newfoundland & Labrador | 9.87 |
9.07 |
10.5 |
+ 6.5 % |
| Nova Scotia | 19.5 |
21.4 |
22.7 |
+ 16.2 % |
| Prince Edward Island | 2.07 |
2.29 |
2.28 |
+10.2 % |
| Quebec | 85.3 |
85.7 |
89.4 |
+ 4.8 % |
In short, while each government pledged to see GHG emissions decrease, with the sole exception of Massachusetts*, they've actually increased, and by plenty. At this point, it is impossible to meet the 2010 targets established by the Climate Change Action Plan, and the usual collection of enviro credentialled pols are talking about really meeting the 2020 targets. As I'll detail in a later post about my own province (Nova Scotia), there's no reason to believe that any progress at all will be made on the 2020 targets either, and much less that it'll actually be met. But leaving that aside, so far as the 2010 target goes, the Climate Change Action Plan isn't worth the paper it was written on.
Who's to blame here? No doubt the politicians who signed the agreement will say they acted in good faith. And yet, the agreement used the weasel words "regional targets"-- any particular state or province didn't need to meet the target, so long as the "region" met it, thereby guaranteeing that none would meet it. And politicans over the intervening years can point at bookshelves full of studies, consultant reports and planning documents saying lots of good things, but what they can't point to is concrete action.
There comes a point when the political leaders have to be called on their dissembling lies, and when it comes to climate change, we've long passed that point.
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* The American numbers reflect fossil fuel burning only, and ignore GHG emissions from agricultural operations, land use changes, etc. Very likely, Massachusetts has seen a real increase in GHG emissions.
