Thank you very much.
I hope everyone has received a copy of the submission we sent in a few days ago.
Before I get into substance, I would like to make clear that the Pembina Institute, which I'm representing today, is a strictly nonpartisan organization. We always try to comment fairly and objectively on policies and on policy proposals. We are often asked for input by politicians and by political parties, but we do not write documents that are published by political parties.
On the substance, the objective of the Bali conference--probably for the majority of the people involved and certainly the environmental community--is to adopt a negotiating mandate on a post-2012 global greenhouse gas reduction regime that will be negotiated with a deadline of 2009. It will include a series of elements that provide sufficient confidence that the world will be on a track to the scale of emission reductions that the scientific analysis has shown are needed to prevent dangerous climate change.
There are a number of key elements that the Climate Action Network International--which is the umbrella for environmental NGOs participating in the UN process--would like to see in the Bali mandate. I'm not going to list all those elements immediately. Most of them are in my submission.
I would note that they do include both stronger absolute emission reduction targets for industrialized countries such as Canada, but also deeper participation post-2012, including quantified commitments by rapidly developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil. These aren't absolute emission reduction targets of the kind that Canada should continue to have, but nonetheless, these are quantified commitments that represent a significant bending of the emissions curve relative to business as usual. I'll come back to that point in a moment.
Clearly, the Bali conference is extraordinarily important. We always say that these UN conferences are important. This one I think is a little bit unique. The scientific message that has been delivered this year in the IPCC's fourth assessment report, as John mentioned, is extraordinarily clear and concerning. I don't think this issue has ever had the public profile it enjoys at the moment. And frankly, time is running out for negotiations. The reason why 2009, as an end date, is so important for the Bali mandate is that we need to ensure that enough time is available for countries to ratify the post-2012 agreement once it's adopted.
It actually took I think eight years for the Kyoto Protocol to receive enough ratifications to enter into force. Three years between 2009 and 2012 is not very much time to allow that to happen, and we must avoid a vacuum in the international legal arrangements after 2012.
I'd also cite the UN Secretary-General, who recently, speaking of his expectations for Bali, said the following, and I quote:
I need a political answer. This is an emergency, and for emergency situations we need emergency action.
Moving on to Canada's position going into Bali, I'd like to highlight three ambiguities--certainly in the statements the government has made publicly--that I think are a concern and need to be resolved as quickly as possible.
First of all, the government has to date avoided taking a position on the question of a two degrees Celsius global warming limit relative to pre-industrial levels. This is a limit that enjoys wide support among both scientists and among governments. Today's United Nations development program report also endorsed a two degrees Celsius limit. I think the Government of Canada needs to state what it considers to be a maximum acceptable amount of global warming that would allow us to avoid dangerous human interference in the climate system, according to the objective of the UN framework convention.
A second ambiguity has to do with the global emission reductions that Canada wants to see. The Prime Minister has a number of times referred to a halving of global emissions by 2050, but the government has not to date stated a base year for those reductions. The reduction in emissions is, strictly speaking, meaningless if it is stated without saying a reduction below what.
A third ambiguity is a question that has been in the media the last couple of days: how global emission reductions should be shared out amongst categories of countries. As John emphasized, there are very wide disparities between different categories of countries.
If you compare a country like Canada with countries like China and India, if you look at per capita emissions, per capita GDP, historical responsibility, there are enormous disparities, roughly five times higher emissions per person, roughly five times higher GDP per person in Canada compared to a country like China. So, clearly, there's a need for Canada, going into these negotiations, to accept that it is not realistic or fair to insist that countries like China or India take on the same types of commitments in the immediate post-2012 period.