Unreal reductions

The Globe and Mail put a copy of the Cons' draft regulations on greenhouse gas emissions in the hands of two environmental groups. And the results are ugly, if entirely predictable:

Greenhouse-gas emissions from Alberta's oil sands would be allowed to rise dramatically under a draft version of the government's long-anticipated climate-change plan obtained by The Globe and Mail.

The internal documents appear to underestimate significantly future oil-sands development as a way of producing more positive figures, said two environmentalists who analyzed the documents for The Globe...

The leaked government documents, marked secret and dated Dec. 20, 2006, show that the government was still pursuing a plan at that time based on intensity targets until at least 2020...

The leaked government documents were analyzed for The Globe by two environmentalists: Louise Comeau of the Sage Foundation, who provided policy advice to the Liberal government for Mr. Dion's 2005 plan, and Matthew Bramley of the Pembina Institute, who recently released a proposal that would see oil sands companies comply with Kyoto by adding about $1 to the production cost of each barrel of oil.

"The federal government's proposal for industry regulation on greenhouse gases is a fraud," Ms. Comeau said. "Fabricating numbers so the current government's intensity approach looks better than the last government's intensity approach is no more acceptable today than it was two years ago. Intensity targets are dishonest. The time to regulate real reductions is now."

Once again, it's hard to see the Cons' strategy as being based on anything but forcing the Libs to vote against a scheme virtually identical to what Stephane Dion previously proposed as Environment Minister. Which only puts all the more pressure on the opposition parties to work together agree as to how to rewrite Bill C-30 to include real emission reduction targets, lest the Cons get away with implementing nothing more than a rough approximation of the Libs' plans from two years ago.