Day 3 brought on a different kind of negotiations at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Our global leaders had always agreed to use a 1990 base level year for GHG emission measuring to help ground a starting point for decreased emissions. Today, a different kind of negotiations arose from Canada who so confidently suggested that the entire rest of the world should change the GHG emissions base year of 1990 to a more “contemporary” date. This is because Canada wants to make their very embarrassing 3% decreased emission target based on the 1990 base level look more substantial. Of course Canada is going to win a Fossil Award for this; the presenter announces “Could Canada’s desire to erase the past have something to do with fact that tar sands emissions have more than doubled from 1990 to now?”

It seems that at this point in the negotiations all the work that I have been doing my whole life to protect our health, environment and climate is totally useless since my Canadian Leaders are making fools of our country. Instead of moving forward in the negotiations, we are going to try to take on the entire world’s internationally accepted base year of 1990. Should we really be regurgitating the ONE thing that the whole world already agreed upon ? Should Canada really be the only idiot to try to complicate things by attempting to move the goalposts for measuring carbon emissions? This is bad.

More interesting news: Obama has taken the same high road as Al Gore on Climate Change, but he might end up being faced with the same brick wall as he approaches congress back home. The brick wall seems fairly unavoidablefor Obama as internal USA politics will overflow on the international stage as Representative  James Sensenbrenner leads a delegation set to oppose US involvement and undercut Obama in Copenhagen.

Now why can’t Canada follow suit by sending an opposition delegation to Copenhagen to hold Harper back from blocking the entire global negotiations? I did speak to Stephen Dion in 2007 in Bali trying to encourage Baird to better represent Canada. This time around with Elizabeth May in Copenhagen- we might have an opportunity to clean our muddied name through an opposing delegation.

But… it’s not like me to be so negative right.. so here is some good news:

One tiny but gutsy island called Tuvalu took a stance today by proposing to create a new open and transparent working group to negotiate the legal action to be taken on national failures to meet said proposed Greenhouse Gas Emission Targets during Copenhagen.  Many nations are calling for “Legally Binding and Enforceable targets” to be set in Copenhagen. These outcomes should include a furthered commitment beyond Kyoto’s 2012 targets and also include the non-kyoto parties. Copenhagen has the potential to sky-rocket pass the Kyoto agreement in a very real way if our leaders can agree to a legally binding and enforceable target and timeline.  You may have thought that Kyoto was a joke simply because there were very few nations that met it’s target. But imagine the next set of targets are legally binding and enforceable- then we will really see success in avoiding Climate Change. The pacific island nations will be one of the first victims of rising seas as warmer temperatures melt glaciers and expand oceans

We will see what’s next…