House of Commons Hansard #32 of the 37th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament's site.) The word of the day was kyoto.
The Speaker
On November 25 a motion standing in the name of the right hon. member for Calgary Centre was placed on notice under the rubric notices of motions, routine proceedings. The notice should properly have been placed under the rubric private members' notices of motions.
I regret any inconvenience this may have caused hon. members.
Order in Council AppointmentsRoutine Proceedings
November 26th, 2002 / 10:05 a.m.
Halifax West Nova Scotia
Liberal
Geoff Regan LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to table, in both official languages, a number of order in council appointments recently made by the government.
Geoff Regan LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons
Madam Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36(8), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the government's response to seven petitions.
John Williams Canadian Alliance St. Albert, AB
Madam Speaker, I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the first report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts concerning chapter 13 of the December 2001 Report of the Auditor General of Canada (Other Audit Observations: Relief for Heating Expenses.
I also have the honour to table the second report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts concerning chapter 13 of the December 2001 report of the Auditor General of Canada (Other Audit Observations: Human Resources Development Canada and the Canada Employment Insurance Commission.
Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to these reports.
Darrel Stinson Canadian Alliance Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to present four petitions from my constituents of Okanagan--Shuswap. They feel that the addition of sexual orientation as an explicitly protected category under sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code could lead to individuals being unable to exercise their religious freedom as protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They call upon Parliament to protect their rights as Canadians to be free to share their religious beliefs without fear of prosecution.
Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON
Madam Speaker, I have a petition regarding border traffic in the city of Windsor. The petitioners request that there be some public participation in the meetings with the federal government to ensure that there is open transparency to the process. Hundreds of people have signed the petition on that particular subject matter.
Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON
Madam Speaker, I also have petitions regarding stem cell research. The petitioners express concerns with regard to the process and more importantly, the debate about that particular subject.
Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON
Madam Speaker, lastly I have a series of petitions regarding child pornography and the concerns of my constituents regarding the accessibility of child pornography in our society right now. They are requesting changes.
Chuck Strahl Canadian Alliance Fraser Valley, BC
Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to present a petition on behalf of constituents of mine and also many others throughout the Fraser Valley and as far away as Edmonton, Alberta. They are concerned about the current child pornography laws and the way they have been interpreted by the courts. They are calling upon Parliament to protect our children by taking all steps necessary to ensure that materials which promote or glorify pedophilia or sado-masochistic activities involving children are outlawed. They want to find a way to do that and this is one of many petitions on this subject.
Joe McGuire Liberal Egmont, PE
Madam Speaker, I have a number of petitions I would like to present on behalf of constituents from Summerside to Tignish who are concerned about non-embryonic stem cell research. They call upon Parliament to focus its legislative support on adult stem cell research to find cures and therapies necessary to treat the illnesses and diseases of suffering Canadians such as diabetes, muscular dystrophy and spinal cord injury.
Geoff Regan LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons
Madam Speaker, I ask that all questions be allowed to stand.
Questions on the Order PaperRoutine Proceedings
The Acting Speaker (Ms. Bakopanos)
Is that agreed?
The House resumed from November 25 consideration of the motion.
Bob Mills Canadian Alliance Red Deer, AB
Madam Speaker, I am pleased you are back so that I will not have to review everything I said yesterday for your benefit. I am waiting for a few other members who were keen on getting this. They are just getting here. If I see them come in I will deal with the plan in detail.
They were interested in the 40 IPCC models that the United Nations developed. They would probably like me to review the 4,000 that were initially developed and broken down to 40 models. I decided that I would only have time for the 40 models. I want to explain modelling and the science behind it, how it works and the variabilities that we can have.
In case there are members here who did not have the benefit of hearing everything yesterday I want to state that our party does care about the environment. I care very much. I consider myself environmentally conscience. I have an environmental background with a training in biology. On that basis I will not go through those details again. I stand here in the House on a very serious issue.
We should deal with two subjects: pollution, and climate change and global warming. Both of those subjects deserve the attention of Canadians and of this House. They deserve the attention of all Canadians who care about their children, grandchildren and future generations.
I also briefly reviewed the position of the Liberals on so many things and highlighted their great deal of talk on air pollution and how their inaction has been startling when we think about some of the situations. I used the Fraser Valley as my best example of air pollution. There we have the second worst air shed in Canada and the federal government did almost nothing to get involved in that issue. It is still doing nothing and does not even bother to make representations before the NEB or before any of the hearings that have gone on or will be going on in the future.
The minister's basic argument is that we should all stop driving so much and not have as many cars. We do not need to have two car families and use so much carbon fuel. We should stop barbecuing to help the environment. We should not run our lawnmowers so often. This is the Liberal solution and commitment to air pollution. The Liberals talk big about downtown Toronto and how our cities are being polluted. But when it comes to action and legislation we see little commitment to carry that out.
I talked about water and the lack of commitment there. Literally the amount of one day of spending on the Kyoto protocol would go a long way to improve the water conditions of the world. Most people have said that if the money were allocated to clean water instead of emissions credits we could provide clean water for every single person in the world.
I talked about landfills and the fact that most of the modern world is not putting its garbage into the ground any more. There is a ticking time bomb leaking into our water tables. There are much better ways in which the world is dealing with garbage. The Great Lakes, the Sydney tar ponds, uranium in the north, all those are examples of where the government has done little.
While talking about water, our third world status of putting sewage into the oceans in such notable places as Victoria, the home and constituency of the environment minister, should never be forgotten if we want to see an example being set for future generations of the caring, feel good, hand over heart kind of philosophy that the government has.
I talked about Kyoto and some of the history of it and the fact that during the whole negotiation process Canada negotiated rather poorly. It had a poorly set economic and implementation plan that did little to help itself. Canada's aim was to go 1% below the Americans. On the other hand the Australians had a plan. They knew the economics and have since opted out.
I talked about the questions that Canadians are asking because they do not understand Kyoto. Yesterday I could not help but talk about my visit to Hamilton on Sunday and about how many people in the audience said they had never really heard about or understood how Kyoto would affect them. I thought about the people driving down the road in all kinds of vehicles and how the federal government was about to do something that would impact every single one of us, our families, grandchildren and future generations.
That is the point we have to get across and the reason I want to speak today about Kyoto. Some 63 members in my party want to talk in detail about Kyoto. We want Canadians to understand that it would impact them. The Canadians I am talking about are a little different from the Canadians who the government has consulted. I am talking about families with two kids worrying about making a living, paying for their house, driving their kids to soccer, and single moms and people on fixed incomes and so on. Those are the people I am talking about.
Those are the Canadians who have not been consulted and do not understand what Kyoto is all about. Those are the people who would be impacted by Kyoto. Those are not the people who would become part of the hearings. Those are not the people who read the newspaper every day. Those are the people who would be most dramatically hit by what Kyoto would bring about. My party will talk about that.
I find it extremely offensive that the environment minister spends his time travelling across this country talking about the doomsday scenario. He is Chicken Little and the sky is falling. He runs across this country saying that the floods, ice storms, and droughts on the Prairies would end as soon as we sign Kyoto.
That is absolutely not true. History has told us that. We have had droughts for a long time. I talked yesterday about the 17th century and the 70 year drought on the Prairies. The fact is that droughts have been getting shorter in time. When John Palliser came to the Prairies he said the land would never be farmed because it was so dry.
These are the things Canadians need to realize. The government's Chicken Little philosophy is not based on science. It is not based on anything. The government talked about little Johnny's asthma being cured by Kyoto. Health and pollution are certainly a subject that the government should deal with but this agreement is about climate change, about global warming and about CO
2.
The minister in his speech yesterday talked about the IPCC and how wonderful it was. We will talk further about that and the 40 IPCC models. About 200 world scientists are recommending what will happen and the variability there.
I introduced the idea of adaptation and how important it is and would be and always has been to the people of the world. People must adapt to changing conditions. These conditions do not change overnight. These conditions change over hundreds of years.
I pointed out that we have had eight ice ages and eight interglacial ice periods. We happen to be in one now. There will be a ninth ice age. Scientists agree with that. In fact nobody disagrees with that. Yet this government would imply that it is not possible and of course it is wrong.
Yesterday I used quotes from the Prime Minister and what he has said. He said the government would have a plan and would not push it down anybody's throat. He said the government would ensure that all parts of the country are treated equally. The Prime Minister also said that Kyoto would not hurt us at all and so on, all of which we know is not true.
I also, of course, talked about the football game, which was an excellent game. I compared the Minister of the Environment to the Viagra man. The reactions were a little different. The Viagra man is very happy jumping over his picket fence. The environment minister would jump over his picket fence, crying, “The world is falling. The insects will take over the world. Man, woman and child will die”. He did not do that but I expected him to.
We also talked about the industry minister, the health minister, and the hon. member for LaSalle—Émard and all the things he said.
Then we started reviewing the so-called plan, the powder-puff PowerPoint presentation of the government. We talked about that plan. I know a lot of members here would like me to review that and make sure we talk about it item by item, because that is probably one of the most important things.
Before I do that, and so we have the opportunity to review this, I want to again go through exactly what Kyoto is all about. We must remember that the public, whether they be in Victoria or Halifax, have asked some questions: First, what is Kyoto? Second, what effect will it have on me? Third, how does it affect my family? Fourth, what will it cost me? Fifth, how will it change my life? Sixth, what will it do for the environment? All Canadians care about the environment. The last question they ask, is there a better way?
I want to spend a lot of today talking about a better way. What is a better way than Kyoto? In the next few hours we will talk about that better way, what exactly that might be and what a Canadian Alliance government would do, if we were in power, to involve Canadians, the provinces and industry.
If people were to turn on any newscast today they would see the government's total failure at getting the provinces and industry on side. Of course every day that goes by the polls tell us that Canadians are not on side. I expect that in another several months a majority of Canadians will say no to Kyoto and yes to a much better plan. Our job, of course, as the Official Opposition, is to make sure Canadians understand what a better way is.
The better way is not the status quo and not doing nothing. The better way to is come up with a plan that will work, that Canadians will be a part of and that industry and provincial governments will work into. Provincial governments are the ones that will be delivering on whatever agreement we come up with.
I will make a Kyoto presentation for hon. members. This is the kind of presentation that I would make at a town hall meeting when I am dealing with a variety of Canadians. I can think of a town hall in Vancouver or one we did in Calgary just a week ago. I can think of a town hall in my own constituency. We also have done some in Ontario. This is the sort of presentation I would give and I will share some of that information with the House.
First, what are the accepted facts that we should deal with when we talk about Kyoto? We should first realize that climate change is occurring and it has always been occurring. No one would say that the climate stays constant. There was a period historically in the 18th century when people were predicting that they could control climate totally. Governments were actually saying that if they took control they could control climate.
I do not think we would find anybody agreeing with that being possible today. We cannot even predict the weather for tomorrow or next week, let alone, with Kyoto, trying to predict the weather for 100 or 1,000 years from now. They tried that in the 18th century and finally agreed they could not do that. Here we are again with a government that is saying that it will predict climate.
Let us agree that climate changes. Climate changes slowly over time. Ten thousand years is the sort of segment that we should be dealing in. We can examine what the weather was like in those time periods by taking ice samples and cores samples from the centre of the earth. We can examine what the climate has been like.
Let us remember, as I said, that there have been eight glacial and eight interglacial periods. There has been in the last 100 years a build up of CO
2
. CO
2
has increased by about 40% in the last 100 years. We can also agree that the temperature has increased.
With that temperature increase there are some problems. If we take the figures we will come up with about a 0.6° Celsius increase in the last 100 years. The problem is that only for the about the last 25 years have we been taking temperatures from satellites. We have 23 satellites that record the weather every second of the day around the world.
How did we take temperature before that? We took it from ground stations for about the last 100 years. We have had ground stations, usually close to cities and airports in the last 50 years, and that is where we take our temperature. However we must remember that a huge percentage of the earth is covered by water. How did we get the water temperatures out in the ocean? We asked sea captains to take the temperature and record its exact position and then send that in to a data collection centre.
One hundred years ago some of those sea captains probably did not really know where they were. Probably they did not really take those samples. Some of them probably made those samples up. The point is, to say that those are accurate temperature samples, most scientists would question them.
In the last 23 years of satellite recording there has not been much change in temperature.
We also must remember that the ground stations that temperatures are recorded from today have now become more and more populated areas. Everyone knows that the temperature in a city is higher than the temperature out in the countryside. Obviously some scientists are arguing that maybe there has not been a major temperature increase. Of course, no one is saying that it has been above 0.9° Celsius in the last 100 years. This Chicken Little, “we are going to burn”, really is not based on any science at all.
The third thing we should talk about are the CO
2
levels. Yes, the CO
2
levels have increased by 40% in the last 100 years by calculation. Some people say that it is 30% and some say that it is 40% but let us say that is 40%. Probably, and most likely, that is because of the burning of carbon fuels, the breakdown of carbon fuels. It also is because, of course, that we have gone now to 6 billion people and every one of us breathes out carbon dioxide because we are animals. That is part of the process of respiration. Plants take in CO
2
in photosynthesis and produce carbohydrates and animals in breathing release CO
2
Yes, there is more CO
2
but in the historical past in the ice cores there are periods of time where CO
2
was way higher than it is today. We must remember that the more CO
2
we have the more photosynthesis we have. Obviously that is reason we have plants and great plant life throughout many parts and the country. I live in an area that was an 800 foot deep inland ocean and there was a great deal of plant life that lived there. We have an abundance of oil and gas today because as it decayed and deposited that is what produced the pockets of oil and gas.
During that time there were hundreds of times more CO
2
than there are now and yet some of the Liberals would have us believe that the only source of CO
2
is humans and human activity. The Mount Etna volcano today releases way more CO
2
than all the animals put together would ever produce. Some would say that at least 90% is from nature and 5% to 10% is from human activity. We are talking about a very small percentage of human involvement in CO
2
What I have just gone through are some of the accepted facts that scientists would agree to.
What are not accepted facts and what facts are under scientific debate? First, has the release of CO
2
from our fossil fuels contributed to global warming? Is that why it is warmer today than it was 100 years ago? There is a lot of uncertainty on that. How much effect have humans actually had on building up the CO
2
? That is a major question that scientists cannot answer today. I will be quoting some of them when we look at the models, which is where we can deal with that issue.
Second, will increasing CO
2
emissions contribute to future climate change? Again we have a great deal of scientific discussion. The IPCC says that it will take at least 10 more years before it understands the science well enough to build the models. It has tried modelling based on facts of the past and most of the models have totally failed. When we get to modelling we will discuss that further.
What are the factors driving climate change? Let us assume that it is a happening and that it is a serious problem. The evidence tells us that 97% of greenhouse gases are water vapour. CO
2
is a major component of the other 3% but also in that is methane and all kinds of other things. In fact some of the science even says that what the sun does, and the influence of sun spots and sun activity, is more important than anything else in creating changes in the greenhouse gas composition and CO
2
levels. However, we will get into that as we go on.
The next major point that we need to make is that greenhouse gases are necessary. All of a sudden, because of Chicken Little, most Canadians would say that we have to get rid of all the greenhouse gases. The greenhouse gases are 97% water vapour. It is what makes our clouds, what protects the earth from the sun's rays and what keeps the temperature on earth 37° Celsius warmer than it would be without greenhouse gases.
If we lowered the temperature of the earth by 37° Celsius we would not have life. We would not have plants and animals. We would have nothing. Greenhouse gases are necessary. The problem, according to Kyoto, is that the greenhouse gases are too intense, are bouncing too much heat back to the earth's surface and that is a problem if we do not want it to get warmer.
I think people in certain parts of Canada might argue, “Hey, right on for greenhouse gases”, with Ottawa being one of them. The people in Ottawa certainly could stand a few degrees warmer and if greenhouse gases could make that happen I guess they might say that is a good trade off.
However the minister was right when he said that in places like sub-Saharan Africa those extra few degrees could make a heck of a lot of difference and certainly could damage them. That is a given.
So we should address the question of climate change. We are not arguing that. Then we need to ask, what are the sources of these gas emissions? Let us remember that Kyoto is targeting CO
2.
That is what it is all about. It is about CO
2
, so let us look at where we get that CO
2
from, on the industrial side of things and the human side of things. The figures look something like this: about 25% of our CO
2
comes from transportation; 4% comes from landfill gases; 10% from agriculture; 10% from buildings; 16% from power generation; 17% from mining and manufacturing, from industry; and 18% from oil and gas.
Let us look at those figures, then, and look at the fact that the minister and the Prime Minister say that we are not going to be affected by any changes, that Kyoto will not cost us any more, that it will not really do anything. We are talking about the reduction of CO
2
to 6% below 1990 levels. Today we are 20% above 1990 levels. From 1999 to 2000, we went from 15% above to 20% above 1990 levels. Canadians are increasing their CO
2
output dramatically.
If we are going to reduce CO
2
as Kyoto commits us to do, what will we have to do? Let us look at the big numbers, such as 25% from transportation. We will have to cut 23% of our release of CO
2
from transportation. That means, then, that if we drive a car, if we ride a train, if we ride a bus or if we fly in an airplane, we will need to have a 23% reduction in all of those things. That means that the cabinet ministers' cars that are parked in front of this building are going to have to be turned off. That also means that those cars out there will have to be little ones. That is what it means. Those cars are running all day out there. That is setting the example for Canadians about reducing CO
2
from transportation.
Bob Mills Canadian Alliance Red Deer, AB
Their motors are running. CO
2
is being released and carbon energy is being burnt. We have to stop doing that. They need to set an example right out front. Right now we could go out there and count them. There are 20 to 30 cars running out there. They will be running all day. That is the example that is being set.
When I was driving on Highway 401 on Sunday, I was looking at all of the people driving beside me. They were all going at between 120 to 130 kilometres in all kinds of big vehicles. I thought to myself, do these people understand what they are getting committed to in the House of Commons, that they are going to have to stop driving at 130? They are going to have to drive at 80 and have smaller vehicles. They will have to put little Johnny into a tighter vehicle with his hockey equipment when they take him to the game. They will be impacted big time. I do not think they know that.
Certainly people in the audience in Hamilton did not know that. They stood up and said that they did not think it was going to affect them. The guy who worked at the Windstar Ford factory that I passed on my way from Toronto stood up in the audience and said, “I didn't think my job was going to be impacted”. He makes Windstars. That is just one example. There are other big vehicles. They are not going to be saleable in Canada. Let us go back to my graph. Twenty-five per cent of CO
2
emissions comes from transportation, so we have to cut transportation. We have to cut by 23% across the country, and what kind of country do we have? We have a cold country. We have a big country. We have a country without the infrastructure to allow us to get around.
It is fine for the Europeans to say that they can just use their trains more, but here we do not have the trains to use. Today CN announced another 1,000 job cuts. We are getting less trains, not more trains. We are getting less rapid transit, not more rapid transit. The government is just talking. It is not introducing any of these things.
As for landfill gases, they make up 4%. We should not have landfills anymore. They were outlawed in Europe 40 years ago. This 4% is a small amount, whereas 16% of our CO
2
comes from power generation, so let us examine that.
What does this 16% mean? Fifty per cent of the power in Canada comes from the burning of coal. The old, traditional methods of burning coal are among the dirtiest producers of CO
2
. Clean coal technology has been developed in Europe and the U.S., but 2008 is the earliest we will be experimenting with it in Canada. That will be happening in Alberta through TransAlta. In 2008, we will have some new coal technology in operation.
What is the government thinking, then, when it tells Canadians that Kyoto will not affect them? The lights in this place have been dimmed on occasion. I think that maybe the government's next step should be to turn the lights out totally because most of what it does seems like it has them out anyway.
Sixteen per cent of our CO
2
emissions is from power generation and the government is telling Canadians that converting all those coal-powered generating plants to natural gas, nuclear power or whatever, will be cheap, that it will not cost money. We would have to use 23% less power than we are using today and what is the best way to get people to stop using gas and power? The best way, of course, is to raise the price.
At these international meetings I have heard the Europeans say that Canadians should be paying $2.50 per litre of gas. In Ontario, it is 66¢ a litre and in Alberta 72¢. Many economists say that in Canada next year a litre of gas will cost $1. That is a long way from $2.50, but that has to be the trend if we are to live with Kyoto.
One does not have to be a rocket scientist to look at these figures and understand them. Twenty-five per cent of our CO
2
emissions is from transportation. If we want to cut our CO
2
, which is what the government is asking us to commit ourselves to, we have to cut transportation. If we are to sign Kyoto, with its 23% below 1990 levels, we have to cut our use of power.
What else? There is mining and manufacturing. Seventeen per cent of our emissions of CO
2
comes from mining and manufacturing. What does that mean? We must remember that mining and manufacturing use energy. If the price of energy goes up by 23% or the use is reduced by 23%, it will be like what SaskPower announced. SaskPower said that if the government signs Kyoto, power rates in Saskatchewan would go up 25%. A half an hour later, and I happened to be on a talk show while this was happening, the president of IPSCO said that what that meant to IPSCO was that it could not pay 25% more for its power and it would have to move south of the border.
The Prime Minister says that we will not lose any jobs, that this will not cost any more money. How is that possible? Does he think Canadians are a bunch of dummies who cannot look at these figures and figure this out? At every town hall meeting where I have gone through these figures, they have figured it out real quick. They understand it totally and they say, “Yes, that will cost us more money. We're going to lose jobs because of it”. As I said, a person does not have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out.
Eighteen per cent of CO
2
emissions comes from oil and gas. One place most of it comes from is our tar sands development. They have improved their CO
2
emissions by reducing them by 30% and they feel that with technology they can go even further in reducing those emissions, but the bottom line is that the emissions are still there.
Does that mean we are not going to extract any more oil and gas? That is what one would assume. If we have to cut by 23%, that industry has to take that hit as well. If that industry has to take that hit, who is going to pay for it? There are the jobs. There is an investment freeze in the country. I would go to Venezuela or Malaysia to put my money in where I do not have those restrictions, because, we must remember, they are not part of Kyoto. Again I ask, how can the government say it is not going to affect some parts more than others?
When I was in Halifax three weeks ago, I asked a cab driver if he thought Kyoto was a good idea. He said, “I know what Kyoto is. It is about that global warming and it is about health”. I then asked him if he thought it would affect him. He said, “Darn right it will”. He said that Halifax finally has an industry that is giving the city jobs and growth. Halifax is booming. He asked me if I knew why it is booming. He said, “Do you see those oil rigs that are being constructed out in the harbour and that are in for repairs? That is why it is booming”. He said that Halifax finally has an industry that is paying the people money and giving them jobs and, because government is government, he said to me, “You are going to take this away from us at the very time we are about to achieve something ourselves”. That is coming from a cab driver, who is saying that he has it figured out, that the federal government is going to damage his way of life.
I am not saying we should not do anything, and I will come to that, but I need 10 days to talk about the alternatives in technology that we could come up with. I am not going to take 10 days because my voice might not last, but let us think about the figures that we have just gone through. Let us think about what has to get hit for Canadians and how it is going to affect them if we sign on to Kyoto: transportation, power generation, manufacturing and industry, lost jobs, lost opportunity, higher power rates, higher gas prices and a hit on our economy.
I do not understand how the Americans could figure this out, how the Australians could figure this out or how Mexico could figure this out. Brazil figured it out. China and India, in Delhi two weeks ago, said they were never going to be part of Kyoto, that they will not be shutting down their economies. All of these other major producers of CO
2
have it figured out, but we do not have it figured out. We are following along like little puppy dogs behind a Eurocentric plan that is out to get the U.S. That is my definition of Kyoto. I will elaborate on that geopolitical front a bit later when I have the opportunity.
So what is the Kyoto protocol? Let us go back and review that protocol. One of the major questions people ask is, what is the Kyoto protocol? It was signed in 1997. It requires 38 of the industrial countries to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases by an average of 5.2% below 1990 levels. The timeframe is that it must happen between 2008 and 2012. Fifty-five countries representing 55% of the emissions of industrialized countries must ratify Kyoto and then must enter into force in a legally binding agreement.
I have heard some people say that we can sign on to this and not have to live up to it. Let me read to the House from the Kyoto protocol about the penalties. It basically states that, according to the Marrakesh accord, nations that ratify Kyoto but do not meet their targets in round one by 2012 are penalized another 30% in emissions cuts and, in addition, such nations cannot sell carbon credits in round two. That makes it pretty clear that there are penalties associated with Kyoto.
Going on from the Kyoto protocol, it states, “in the case of compliance with emissions targets, annex 1 parties are granted 100 days after the expert review of their final annual emissions inventory has finished to make up any shortfall in compliance mainly through emissions trading”.
For Liberals out there or for Canadians out there who are listening to this, remember there are penalties. Beyond that, the European Union has said that it will introduce WTO action which will affect trade. There are definite penalties around the Kyoto protocol.
To go a little further into the history, because everybody asks what is Kyoto?, the environment minister in Ontario has said, “Kyoto is a Japanese car”. A lot of people are probably at the point where they really think Kyoto will not affect them and that it is some negotiated thing in a far off place, in a beautiful city in Japan. As I said yesterday, I expect that Kyoto probably wishes the meeting had not been there. It probably would have rather had it the Ottawa protocol and then the rest of the world could hate Ottawa. However the meeting was in Kyoto.
Let us go back to 1992. The United Nations framework on the convention of climate change included a legally binding voluntary pledge. I think a legally binding voluntary pledge is an oxymoron, but we signed it to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2000. We said we would freeze them and they would not increase.
Nobody did anything. If we look at most of the text of that, the whole purpose of it was the idea that within the United Nations there was a concept, probably correctly, that the north had developed all its natural resources, had been responsible for the production of CO
2
into the environment and now they should pay the price. They should transfer money from the north to the south. Most countries bought into that.
What they did not understand was that when the money was transferred to a dictatorship someplace else, that money would not be used for environmental cleanup or to help the people of that country. Instead it would be used to buy F-18s or to invest in Swiss bank accounts. That is what corrupt governments do. They do not think about their people and they usually do not think about the environment.
In 1995 everybody realized that no one was living up to these international agreements and by 1997 we went to Kyoto. We signed this protocol. Everybody in the House during that period will remember the questions which were asked in the House. We asked the then environment minister about the plan and what would happen in Kyoto? Would she agree to this agreement on climate change? Was there an economic plan? Had the provinces been consulted? She did that the week before she left in Regina.
These questions were asked and the answer we received in the House was not to worry about it. The Liberals would not sign anything that would affect us negatively. The Liberals would not do anything to the Canadian people, the provinces and industry that would damage the economy or cost any money. It sounded pretty innocent.
The environment minister went off to Kyoto, and it appeared the Prime Minister was in charge of the file. At that time it was made very clear what our plan was.
Our plan was to ensure that whatever the Americans agreed to that we would beat them. Let us think about that for a minute. We had to beat the Americans. The Americans went there with all kinds of doubts, knowing that it was an economic disaster. They said that they would go 5% below 1990 levels. The Europeans did not do as well. Australia went 8% above 1990 levels. Others could not decide on a figure but said that they would come up with it later. Canada said it would go 6% below 1990 levels and beat the Americans. That was then the triumph back in the House in December 1997, when our environment minister returned and stood up in the House and said, “We had a great victory. We beat the Americans”.
Nobody paid much attention at that time because we had signed hundreds of agreements. The Auditor General said that we signed 200 environmental agreements in the last 10 years. She audited 60 of them and we had been a failure in most of them. We had not done anything. Therefore most people thought Kyoto was just another agreement that we would sign and do nothing about it.
We have somewhat of an international reputation now for doing things like that. We even call the President of the country next door, which is one of our best friends and a superpower, names. We are not too bright when it comes to some of these international negotiations.
However we agreed and without a plan, we then put that on the back burner and basically did very little.
In 1998, in Buenos Aires, there was a meeting of all the members who had signed on to Kyoto. Most of them said that they had some real problems with it. They had done some economic planning and would have to cut power production, or cut the use of fuel or cut air service. They said they would have to do a lot to achieve the goals. They left Buenos Aires in 1998 with really little resolve and with little resolution to move forward.
In 2000, there was another meeting at The Hague of the members of this umbrella group. Most of them not only went to the meeting but they went and said that they could not achieve the targets and left. At this point, a number of countries put forward their problems.
Then in February we went to Trieste. It was interesting because at this point some countries were starting to get the idea of this Kyoto thing.
Russia said that it could be a pretty good deal for it. It could sell credits and get billions of dollars from other countries by selling these credits. The developing countries said that it was a good deal for them because they did not have to hit their targets. The other developed countries would have to hit targets but they could sell more things to those countries and that would be good for their economies.
France said that it was okay. It could hit its targets because it was 80% nuclear. As long as it had nuclear power, it could support Kyoto. France thought it was a good deal because it could then start selling energy to other countries because it had clean energy.
Remember that the European Union is made up of 15 countries that can interchange credits, They can take credits from one country to the other. They have an internal credit trading system.
It was interesting that Germany said that it was okay too. It had credits for all the deindustrialized East Bloc countries. Italy said that it was okay because it had a fixed population, 55% were over 65 and its birth rate was .2%. Therefore it did not have a big problem with that.
Europe is in a totally different ball game. It is smaller, has better transportation, is not as cold, et cetera.
The real crunch came after Trieste when Christine Whitman, the environment minister in the U.S., said that she thought the Americans could go along with it and would come up a different plan. The Europeans would have nothing to do with that. Therefore, in March of 2001 the Americans said that they were opting out of Kyoto. That was a major blow to Kyoto at that time. The Americans were out.
I will talk about the American emissions in a few minutes, but their emissions have been dropping. Thirty-nine states will probably beat Kyoto. That just shows that if the people, the industry and the politicians are behind something it can happen. California is a good example. We always like to say that the Americans are not doing anything. They doing way more than we are, and it is not just talk. They are actually accomplishing something.
We then got to Bonn in July 2001. The former deputy prime minister went there on our behalf. He was in a fog a lot of the time, but he said that we had to have sinks and that we had to have energy credits for forest and agriculture.
That was the first time we had heard that sort of thing. That should have been introduced way back in the 1990s. Clean energy credits and sinks were never introduced. As a result of that Canada, said that if it was not given the sink credits we would opt out of Kyoto. That was probably the wisest thing that any government official ever said.
The Europeans were so set on keeping us in that they said they would give us the sinks for 30 megatonnes credit. We did not have to tell them how we would get there or how we would monitor it or anything, they would just give it to us. It was a throw away to keep us in the agreement. Following up on that, and I will talk about sinks in a few minutes, Canada took that as a great victory.
That is some of the history.
Darrel Stinson Canadian Alliance Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I am sitting here listening to this and I am wondering where everyone is. I would like to call quorum.
And the count having been taken:
Kyoto ProtocolGovernment Orders
The Acting Speaker (Ms. Bakopanos)
There is quorum. The hon. member for Red Deer may continue.
Bob Mills Canadian Alliance Red Deer, AB
Madam Speaker, I will just review Bonn, just to pick up on that, because I think some of the members were distracted.
In Bonn we got our sinks. The Europeans felt that there was no real science there and that there was no real way to monitor that, but we got them. We said that we really had something, we had 30 megatonnes of which were taken care.
However remember that our gap is 240 megatonnes. We talked a bit about where we would find that 240 megatonnes. I will review that for every member, because I know every member wonders from where we will get those kinds of numbers. Obviously we know now, and everyone will have written this down, that 30 megatonnes is from our sinks.
In November 2001 our government went to Marrakesh keen on Kyoto and the rules were set. This would be the enforcement rule setting. There was a lot of squabbling and late nights by our negotiators, but they came up with some penalties. These penalties are outlined very clearly. Any Liberal who thinks there are no penalties associated with ratification of Kyoto should hear this from the Kyoto accord. These were agreed to in Marrakesh and whoever might be the prime minister in the future will have to know that there are penalties associated with the ratification of Kyoto. It will not be good enough to say that was done by another prime minister and it will will not work. There are penalties to an international agreement.
The ratification in the Kyoto protocol says, “According to the Marrakesh accords, nations who ratify Kyoto but do not meet their targets in round one by 2012 are penalized another 30% in emissions cuts and in addition such nations cannot sell carbon credits in round two”.
It goes on to state, “In the case of compliance with emissions targets, Annex 1 parties--us--are granted 100 days after the expert review of their finding annual emissions inventory as finished to make up any shortfall in compliance mainly through emissions trading”.
What that says is we can buy the credits if we have not achieved our targets. That would be hundreds of billions of dollars to do that. Members in the House who think they may be prime minister in the future should read the Kyoto protocol. They should understand that there are penalties and they are definite penalties. For members who go out and say that we can ratify Kyoto and nullify it later, they are wrong.
Maybe we should read this again so that it is understood that there are penalties associated with the ratification of Kyoto. Therefore, when the members vote and if they vote in all conscience for the good of the Canadian people, they can never say again in public that they were not told there were penalties because there are definitely penalties.
Also articles from the European Union are being worked on legally to bring World Trade Organization claims against the U.S. We can get caught in that crossfire and those trade restrictions can be put on us when we have not lived up to our commitment. There is no way we will achieve our Kyoto credits.
Again this has to be emphasized in the House and there is no place else to do it. The media that keeps track of this needs to understand that anybody who plans to be prime minister of this country must understand that once Kyoto is ratified, by the end of this year according to the present Prime Minister, there will be penalties. The clock starts ticking then.
As soon as we are one of those countries representing 55% of the emissions, even though we have only 2% of the emissions, we are going to be subject to a 30% penalty that we have to buy our way out of if we do not live up to those commitments. By the year 2012 that commitment could be as much as 30% to 40% below 1990 levels. We will have to turn out all the lights. We will have to stop driving everything. It will bring wreckage on the economy.
I am starting to sound like the environment minister saying that the sky is falling. I do not like that because we have a better way, a better solution, a solution that anyone wanting to be prime minister of this country would want to hear. We have a better way, a made in Canada way, a way that does not trap us into this kind of European quagmire where they are out to get the Americans through the WTO. That is what it is all about. It says it clearly here.
I have heard members in the House who have said out on the public campaign trail that we have no penalties, that we are not going to do anything to hurt our country, and that if we cannot live up to Kyoto, we will not. To say that we will not when it is an international agreement is totally impossible. We cannot do that. That is a total piece of deceit. I would certainly hope that any members who are here now will be voting against that ratification until we know what the costs are, until we know what the plan is, and until we have an implementation.
The member for LaSalle--Émard made it very clear that he must have a plan, that he must have the costs, that he must know how it is going to impact the Canadian people. He cares, I think, about the mom and dad and their two kids. He cares about the people out there. That is why I know he is going to oppose the ratification of Kyoto until we have the costs, the implementation plan and the effect on our economy. It just has to be that way because we certainly would believe that the Prime Minister and future prime ministers are honourable men and know the facts before they do something.
Let me carry on because there are penalties associated with Kyoto and we must all know them. We must constantly quote from the Kyoto accord that the Prime Minister wants to sign.
We are at Marrakesh. The Russians are now getting some steam. They are saying that they want to double their forest credits, that Canada was given them in Bonn and they want them for themselves. They agreed and they doubled Russian credits for forests. That is fine. By the time we got to Johannesburg they really had a head of steam and were saying, “Hey, you thought that carbon credits were going to be millions? We want billions”. That is a whole other issue that we will talk about in a minute.
Because sinks are important and because they are part of this, if we talked to our agriculture critic he would say that is great, that these sinks might be a good thing, we have them as credits. That means that farmers are going to have a source of income from their methods of farming. If they change to direct seeding, do not use so much diesel fuel, do not work their crops under in the same way and so on, they are going to get credits. That is probably good for farmers.
The provinces would say it would be good because they would get those credits. Their farmers would not ask for any help because they would already have a source of income, so that should be good. Obviously agriculture and forestry are provincial matters so that should be clear. I do not think there would be any argument, but what has happened? In the government plan all of the credits for sinks are going to the federal government, which is using those credits. They are not going to the provinces, not to the farmers, not to the foresters, but to the federal government.
Today a premier is going before the courts to say it is a total infringement on their constitutional rights. There is not a Bloc member who should be able to vote for this because of the tearing away of those rights from the provinces. They should be totally opposed to this just because this is a grab of power, a grab of the resources of the Canadian provinces, let alone the farmers and the foresters.
Are sinks an important issue? We better believe they are an important issue. We better believe that the millions of dollars that will be spent in court challenges is a waste of money that should be going into new technology, making Canada a leader. We should not be wasting it on constitutional challenges. We should not be providing farmers and foresters with some hope and then tearing it away from them, but I guess that is the Liberal way of handling Kyoto.
What we will do with sinks is try to get more credit for them. How will we do that? First of all we have to establish what they are. Then we have to realize that different aged trees have different amounts of CO
2
absorption. An old tree does not absorb as much CO
2
as a young tree. That is a biological fact.
Obviously someone will have to go out and age all of our forests. That should be a really good bureaucratic job. When the person gets home and tells his mom what he does, he is measuring trees to see how old they are. That should take a while. I can see our endangered species police driving down one road, our species at risk police driving down another road, our forest counters driving down another road and our DFO officers with their flak jackets and machine guns driving down another road. Will everybody become a civil servant in order to handle all this administration?
We will have to go out to farms and tell farmers they did not direct seed this year, they plowed the field or they lit a little fire out there and burnt some of the stubble and we will have to charge them for that. We will have to put them in jail probably. We have put farmers in jail for lesser things than that. Burning a stubble field could be almost capital punishment or something, because we do not really care about our farmers or our foresters. I think this whole sinks issue is an example that we do not care about the provinces either. Again, it is an example is how they have been treated in this whole negotiation.
Where are we with sinks? We are in a big mess. There is a court challenge already started. The Bloc should be pretty upset about it. Already eight of the 10 provinces are totally opposed to it. Farmers and foresters should be really opposed to this.
The number of friends the government will have will be pretty small. The Liberals may find themselves to be like the Conservatives. I have often said that there are legacies. Certainly a former prime minister, Mr. Trudeau, has a legacy. In western Canada his legacy is the national energy program. No one has forgotten that. Bilingualism and multiculturalism programs are all legacies of Mr. Trudeau which people remember.
Mr. Mulroney certainly has a legacy. His legacy was increasing the debt many times as well as the GST. I do not think many Canadians have forgotten whose legacy that was.
I am totally convinced that the legacy of the present Prime Minister will be Kyoto. That legacy will be very similar to the legacy of those other guys. How many other Canadians have the same view?
I could not be any more convinced that Kyoto is the wrong way to go. I would not be doing town hall meetings across the country if I did not believe that. I would not be working seven days a week on this file or talking so long in the House if I did not believe that this is the worst treaty the country could ever sign. It will have the biggest impact on most Canadians than anything we have ever done in the House.
As this presentation goes on I see a lot of people on the other side taking notes and wondering about all of this. It is good that they are because this is stuff they can take home for their town hall meetings. I know they will want to inform their constituents. They will want to talk to the average person who will be affected by CO
2
Let me talk about the developing countries. They are definitely taking a stand right now, most notably India and China.
Where is China in this whole picture? Basically it has a huge supply of brown coal. It needs energy desperately. The Three Gorges dam will provide 10% of that energy. It has two nuclear power plants where no environmental assessment was done by the government but that is fine because it is just in China. Those nuclear power plants came on stream this month and are providing China with energy but it still has a huge shortage of energy. It will have to burn the soft coal unless Canada is innovative enough to come up with technologies.
Clean coal technology has been developed in Europe and the U.S. The first trial plant will be in Alberta in 2008 by TransAlta. We are not leaders. We cannot transfer this technology to China. We have guys lined up to transfer this technology.
Those countries made it very clear in Delhi that they will not handicap their economies by signing on to an agreement that will damage their economies beyond repair. They are growing and developing countries and they are going to stay that way. If Canada wants to help them be cleaner they will go with that, but if we are telling them to reduce their CO
2
and sign on to Kyoto in 2012 we can forget it. Those negotiations were to begin in 2005. They have said they will not be there. Is that significant or not? Yes it is.
Let us look at China. China on a graph is going straight up with CO
2
emissions because it is a huge developing country. It is now the number two producer of CO
2
in the world. The U.S. has gone from 30% CO
2
to 23% and in 2012 it will be 18%. China is 17% today. China doubles its CO
2
output every 12 years. In five years China will pass the U.S. and will become the number one emitter of CO
2
The government says it will cut the use of carbon by all Canadians by 20%. Is that not wonderful. We are 2% of the world. We are going to put ourselves in a tunnel and it will not make a bit of difference to the environment, but China is not going to be part of it and we do not care.
India is a huge developing country with over one billion people. That country is now number five in the production of CO
2
. India is growing; its industries are growing.
India and China say they are not going to be signing on to Kyoto any time in the future. They are not going to be annex II countries. They are not going to be coming to the table in 2005. How can the government sit here and say it is going to sign it?
I have heard, “We will sign it, but we do not have to implement it,” wink, wink, nod, nod. Need I say this again, there are penalties, there are penalties, there are penalties. We will come back to those penalties again. I hope that any future prime minister has gotten the message.
India is increasing dramatically. I know I cannot use props, but I have graphs that show what India and China are doing. I know I cannot use them but there are graphs that show all this and show the exact numbers.
Brazil and Mexico have no targets at all. They have no intention of signing on to this. The government says that Canada will show leadership and that those countries will follow us.
For most of my life I have travelled. I have been in every country in the world pretty well. I know that the status of Canada due to the present government and previous governments is falling. There is not a whole bunch of people out there who will follow us just because we are such wonderful, good, liberal people and we care about the environment.
Tell the people of Fraser Valley how much the government cares about the air. Tell them. There are thousands of people out there who know the government does not care. Talk to the people about the sewage outlets in the three major cities in Canada. Tell the people that the government really cares. Tell the people at the tar ponds. Tell the people in northern Saskatchewan. Tell the native people who have hundreds of boil water orders. Tell all of them how much the government cares about the environment. The Liberals care; if they keep saying it and pounding their chests often enough, they might start believing it.
Let us talk about CO
2
emissions. I will talk about these figures and I know for all the members taking notes it is hard to do. If they call my office I will give them a hard copy of this.
I am talking about world emissions of CO
2
starting with 1995. I will say right now that the developing world in 1995 represented 27% of the CO
2
emissions. In the developed world it was 73% of the emissions. The breakdown is the U.S., 22%; western Europe, 17%; eastern Europe and some other countries in that area, 27%; Asia, 7%; the Mideast, 3%; Africa, 3%; Latin America, 4%; China, 11%; and the other parts of Asia other than China, 6%.
We have 27% from the developing world and 73% from the developed world in 1995. Let us look at the figures for 2035. We will move those forward 40 years and see where it will be. This will be with Kyoto in place and people living up to Kyoto claims. Remember that there are penalties if countries do not live up to Kyoto.
We will assume that they all do. Where would we be then? The developing world will be at 50% of CO
2
emissions. The developed world will now be down to 50%. The developing world has gone from 27% to 50%. The developed world has gone from 73% to 50%.
That is the trend line that carries on in the models of the IPCC which I will get to later. For those models that is the figure being used. They are now projecting to the year 2100. I have chosen the year 2035 as a reasonable length of time down the road.
At that point, the other parts of Asia will be 14%, China, 17%; Latin America, 6%; Africa, 8%; the Mideast, 5%; eastern Europe, 19%; western Europe, 12%; and the U.S., 15%. The U.S. has dropped down to fifth or sixth spot and the developing countries have come up. China will be the leader in the production of CO
2
It is interesting that western Europe is going to improve by only 5% simply because it did not agree to the targets that everybody else did. This was a European developed way to get at the U.S. and that is exactly how it is developing.
We see the facts. Those are from the models. How can the government deceive people into believing that this is not so? This is from the environment group. This is from the United Nations, the IPCC, the scientists who say they know and who the government quotes as experts all the time. Are they telling Canadians these things? I have not heard it. All I have seen are the ads on television saying that little Johnny is going to die, that little Johnny has asthma, that the forests are dying.
That is not even the truth. CO
2
is used for photosynthesis. It is to help plants.
Should we deal with pollution? We sure should. Pollution is a terrible problem. The person on the environment committee from the Windsor area in southern Ontario has told me about the terrible air in that community. We should do something about it. The Fraser Valley has the second worst air shed. Something should be done about that. We should deal with it. We should put in scrubbers. We should go after industry to fix it, but that is not what Kyoto is about.
Kyoto is about CO
2
. Kyoto is about an international agreement. It appears the government does not understand that.
Let me review again where Europe is. Europe can ratify this thing easily. The 15 countries are together on this. They can interchange credits and they think they are going to be fine. They have the advantage of the deindustrialization of eastern Europe which resulted in all those credits. The European Union can transfer credits from EU country to EU country. They have a bloc of 15 countries in which to transfer credits around.
We are a country of one. We cannot transfer credits. It does not matter if we transfer among the provinces. We cannot transfer to the U.S., Mexico, Brazil or other countries in the Americas. If we are going to have a plan at all, why is it not a made in the Americas plan which involves North America and South America? That would work a lot better.
Kyoto ProtocolGovernment Orders
An hon. member
It could be the western hemisphere, from Italy east.
Bob Mills Canadian Alliance Red Deer, AB
The Prime Minister thinks Italy is in the western hemisphere too. He may even think it is in the Americas, I do not know, but he sort of implied that the other day.
We need something that will work and we need it to be in the Americas. We need to involve our number one trading partner, the U.S. We need to involve our NAFTA partner, Mexico. We need to involve the developing countries of South America. We need all of them on side with this plan. What does the government not understand about that?
In Europe most of the coal generation has been replaced by gas. We could examine how that was done. There are two conclusions I came up with when I researched this. One is that it was getting very hard to get coal inexpensively. That was one of the first things.
The second thing was that Maggie Thatcher wanted to break the coal unions in Britain and she did it by turning all of Britain's energy generation to natural gas. It worked perfectly. She got rid of a real political problem. She had later ones but it worked at that point in time.
As well, Europe is a much smaller place. It has a dense population. Members of my family who live in Europe find it easy to get from point to point by rail. In fact many people there do not even own a car because they can get on a train every 15 minutes and get to the next city. I do not know, Madam Speaker, if you have tried taking the train in most parts of Canada, but in many parts there are not even tracks let alone trains, so we cannot use that as an argument.
Of course, Europe is warmer. The Europeans have more nuclear energy. All of those are reasons. A country like France which is 80% nuclear can easily say it can hit its Kyoto targets.
It is very interesting that in Brussels in October the European Union had a presentation from a group of economists. The economists told the European Union at the European parliament that the European Union cannot hit its targets without damaging the economy of its countries. That is the European Union which has very limited targets with all those advantages and it will have trouble hitting its targets. If it will have trouble hitting its targets and many of those countries are already near 1990 levels and we are at 20% above 1990 levels, going to 30% above 1990 levels, if it cannot hit its targets without damaging its economy, how are we going to do it?
That is what the question is, what is it going to do to Canadians? What will it do to the person on a fixed income? What will it do to the mom and dad with their kids, to that single mom, to the people whom the Liberals--hold our hands over our hearts--care about so much? What will it do to them? It will destroy them. They will have higher fuel bills. They will have higher power bills. They will have more costly transportation. A number of them will lose their jobs.
Why would we sign something? Remember, and let me repeat, for those people who say, “I can vote for the ratification of Kyoto, but boy we are going to go slow on the implementation”, we do not have to do this. For any future prime minister who says that there are not penalties from Kyoto, let me repeat that according to the Marrakesh accords, nations who ratify Kyoto but do not meet their targets in round one by 2012 will be penalized another 30% in emissions cuts. In addition, such nations cannot sell carbon credits in round two.
At the end of this period, if a party's emissions are still greater than its assigned amount, it must make up the difference in the second commitment period, plus a penalty of 30%. It will also be barred from selling under emissions credits and within three months it must develop a compliance action plan detailing the action it will take and it can buy credits to buy itself out of its inability to hit those targets.
If I were going to be a future prime minister, and I do not intend to be, I would certainly want to know that there were penalties. I would certainly not in a speech ever again say, “We can ratify Kyoto just to make the Prime Minister happy and then we can forget about it and we will not do anything to hurt our economy. We will do nothing to hurt Canadians and our economy will not be hurt by this because if we cannot comply, we will not comply and that is it”. How could any prime minister, present or future, ever say that? They cannot. They would be dishonest to the Canadian people if they said that. They would be dishonest to the provinces. They would be dishonest to every single Canadian.
Let us go on with the presentation--
Bob Mills Canadian Alliance Red Deer, AB
I appreciate that certainly from members of my party but it is appreciated that the Liberals are applauding as well. They did not know a lot of this. They did not know this material. The Prime Minister and the people in cabinet have kept it from them. It is really good that there is this opportunity for all of the Liberals to be informed about Kyoto and to understand it better. Obviously now they will go back home, have town hall meetings, and inform their constituents so they understand what Kyoto is all about.