Caution: Hypocrites At Work

Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson on climate change talks at the APEC meeting…

That Kyoto miscreants Australia and Canada should be considered driving forces toward a communiqué consensus on climate change ranges between the laughable and the hypocritical.Australia never signed the Kyoto Protocol and voluntarily gave itself extremely generous emission-reduction targets – 8 per cent above 1990 levels by 2008-2012, compared with Canada’s 6 per cent below. Prime Minister John Howard was an early skeptic about climate change. Canada, of course, amassed the worst record of those countries that signed Kyoto. Given these performances, other countries can be forgiven for choking when Mr. Howard and Stephen Harper lay on the rhetoric about saving the planet. Saving their political skins is more like it. Full column: Globe and Mail, September 7, 2007 (subscription may be required)