Is Canada a hypocrite?

I was recently reading an online blog titled, “Canada’s Hypocritical Role on Climate Change”, which outlined reasons for why the Kyoto Protocol was an impossible endeavour for Canada and suggested solutions for the future. Criticism of Canada’s role on this global issue has been vocalized both from delegates, such as the UN climate chief, Yvon de Boer, all the way to concerned facebook users all around the world. I have to admit, being relatively ignorant to the debate on climate change, I was shocked to discover that despite ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, Canada (amongst other nations) could not meet its national quota.

For those readers who may not be familiar with the Kyoto Protocol, it is a protocol in an international treaty amongst thirty seven countries, signed in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan. The approach of the Kyoto Protocol is simple: designate national quotas for greenhouse gas emissions in an attempt to control the combined strain greenhouse gases are having on the environment.

While its approach sounds simple enough, the protocol itself is actually quite complex. The reason being is that on an international platform, the range of national economic infrastructures is vast. Not only that, but through time, the economic and political developments of these countries is bound to flux. Consequently, delegating static national quotas to these dynamic nations is a difficult process. In addition, the effort to establish “fair” national quotas is another debate altogether. In the development of the treaty, each country came in with its own interests in regards to the method used to evaluate the emission quota for each nation. Finding a balance was indeed a laborious and complicated process.

Despite all these efforts however, the Kyoto Protocol has been labelled (by some) as a complete failure. Whether this is or is not the case is another issue altogether. The debate of whether the Kyoto Protocol is indeed a failure will not be addressed in this blog. However, one can conclusively state that despite the Kyoto Protocol, countries like Canada and China are presently hopelessly over their emission quotas, which can be viewed as a failure on their independent national platforms (not necessarily on the international platform).

What interested me was the opinion of Michael Cleland in the blog mentioned above. He did not identify Canada’s failure to abide to the Kyoto Protocol as a hypocritical move, but rather, he labelled Canada’s signing and ratification of the treaty itself as the root of its hypocrisy. He argues that the signing of the treaty was made in light of blatant clues signalling the impossibility of the environmental endeavour the protocol attempted to make. He, along with many others such as Al Gore, has made appeals, outlining reasons for the problems surrounding the Kyoto Protocol.

Assuming the Kyoto Protocol was a failure, my question is, how can an international group of some of the most intelligent people in the world set such unrealistic goals for themselves? Were they simply being optimistic? Or were their far-fetched goals simply a reaction to the extremity of the need for greenhouse gas emission reductions?

Labelling the treaty as a “failure” in 2011 is one thing, but coming to that conclusion in 1997 requires two very different degrees of insight. One man who prematurely voiced the ineffectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol is Patrick Michaels, Professor of Environmental Studies, at the University of Virginia. By 1998, he had concluded that the Kyoto protocol “has no benefit at an enormous cost.” Unfortunately, it took other people substantially more time to come to this conclusion. Perhaps the “blindingly obvious evidence” wasn’t so blindingly obvious after all.