Canada:It is unlikely that Canada will be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at all in the next few years, let alone achieve the major cuts needed to meet its Kyoto targets, its prime minister Stephen Harper said yesterday.
"The first step, realistic step ... will be to try over the next few years to stabilise emissions, and obviously over the longer term to reduce them," Mr Harper said.
"But as I've said before, I think realistically the only way you can get absolute reductions is through the application of new technology over time. I don't think realistically we can tell Canadians: 'Stop driving your car, stop going to work, turn the heat off in the winter'."
Canada's emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, blamed for global warming, are now 33 per cent above the level it agreed to reach by 2012 under the Kyoto Protocol.
Mathematically, that would require a 25 per cent cut in emissions from current levels, something Harper has long said would be impossible.
The report by the world's top climate scientists, released in Paris yesterday, said global warming was mostly manmade, spurring calls for government action to prevent irreversible damage from rising temperatures.
Mr Harper's government has been under fire from all three opposition parties over its climate change stance, and he dispatched the environment minister John Baird to Paris for the release of the report.
Mr Baird told journalists the report, which predicted more warming at higher latitudes, showed Canada would be affected worse than most.
"We're seeing global warming happening at a greater rate in the northern hemisphere," he said. "We [ in Canada] are going to feel a disproportionate burden."
Pressed on whether Canada could meet its Kyoto targets, he said: "I'm going to focus on what we can do. We're going to work hard to cut greenhouse gas emissions." - (Reuters)