The difference between Kyoto and the new U.S.-led climate pact that Stephen Harper is suddenly keen to join

CBC News Online | Updated May 19, 2006

Goodbye Kyoto, hello Asia-Pacific Partnership. They sound alike, charmingly Oriental you might say. But in fact there is a world of difference between the two climate schemes.

The Kyoto Protocol is the UN-led initiative designed to reduce man-made greenhouse gases to below their 1990 levels. It has been ratified by 163 nations but only 39 of the most developed countries are currently obliged to cut their emissions by 2012.

Canada was one of the prime movers of Kyoto early on. But the new Conservative government says we will never meet our 2012 target (we are apparently almost 35 per cent over at the moment).

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Australian counterpart John Howard show up in the same limo for a press conference in Ottawa. The leaders of two big energy-producing countries, neither has much time for the Kyoto climate accord, but both see nuclear as being the big energy option of the future. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)

And Ottawa appears to want to join the new Australian-inspired, U.S.-led group called the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, also known as the AP6 or, to its critics, Kyoto Lite.

The Harper government approached Washington about becoming a member of the AP6, the U.S. chief climate change negotiator acknowledged the other day. And the prime minister has been talking with his Australian counterpart John Howard, who has been on a three-day visit to Ottawa, reportedly trying to get Australia's backing as well.

At a press conference, Stephen Harper called the Asia-Pacific Partnership "the kind of initiative the world needs" and went on to say that effective climate policies must include the world's largest emitters, by which he was presumably referring to such AP6 nations as China, India, and the U.S. who are not facing Kyoto reduction targets.

The first part of that statement may well be true. But the second part is more problematic. It is often overlooked, but China and India are in fact Kyoto signatories (the U.S. and Australia bowed out for their own reasons). It is just that, as developing nations they were given a by for the first round of reductions.

And it is this aspect of the new AP6 pact – and Canada's interest in it – that has environmentalists and many European nations so worked up: They say if wealthy countries like Canada won't keep to their reduction commitments, and are also trying to lessen their load for the post-2012 period, how will the world convince countries like China and India, who are still crying poor, to shoulder their burden in 2012 as well?

The new kid on the block

In any event, the AP6 is an intriguing concept, even if it's not everyone's cup of tea. Composed of six countries – the U.S., China, India, Australia, South Korea and Japan – the group was conceived just a year ago, had its first working meeting in April and, on the surface at least, expounds a rather noble purpose: To help the developing economies of China and India in particular make their great industrial leap forward by using the best, most environmentally sound technologies the world can offer.

The fact that the U.S., China and India are among the top producers of climate-warming greenhouse gases on the planet gives their cause a bit of urgency.

The U.S. and China rank one and two, while the group itself accounts for over one-half of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Australia has been the world's biggest per capita emitter for several years and Canada is right up there as well though our emissions are something in the order of two per cent of the world's total.

Kyoto Lite?

Most environmentalists, however, are not impressed. As a technique for controlling greenhouse gas emissions, the AP6 sets no emission targets, mandates no deadlines and therefore does nothing to create incentives for companies to control emissions and sell surplus quotas.

Even some prominent Republicans, looking at the meagre $57 million US Washington has allotted this project, have called it a largely PR exercise, a face-saver for countries like the U.S. and Australia that chose not to ratify Kyoto and are now facing international heat. Australia, mind you, has said all along it intends to meet what would have been its Kyoto target; it just wasn't prepared to do that formally.

» See Reality Check: Life support for the Kyoto protocol

Still, the AP6 is starting to gain momentum. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, though an ardent Kyoto supporter, has voiced his approval. One selling point is the AP6 theory, based on computer modelling, that if China and India were to adopt current best practice techniques for all new power plants, that would reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5 per cent.

Against this can be put more recent computer modelling by The Climate Institute of Australia. It just reported that, even with the most ambitious assumptions under AP6, the best case scenario would see global greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.

Still, a handful of countries have been sniffing around this new partnership, according to news reports. And prominent business groups in Europe and Southeast Asia have been talking up its potential.

So the jury is still out. Is it simply PR for the Kyoto-bashers? Or real enviro-politick for the developing world?

Or is it merely about selling coal?

An iceberg floats off Greenland near the Arctic circle last year. Scientists say that global warming has had an increasing effect on the Arctic region, with glaciers shrinking, the temperature of Arctic waters warming, and permafrost softening. (John McConnico/The Associated Press)

The coal pact

That is the other nickname for the AP6 and when you look at the economics of the world's cheapest, most abundant and arguably most polluting energy source – king coal – it is not hard to see why.

China is the world's biggest coal user, for its generating plants and its steel mills. And though it has plenty of its own reserves, its mines are backward and dangerous and, at its current rate of growth, forecasters predict it will need to import much more in coming years.

What's more, the four Asian members of the AP6 account for over half the world's steel production. Steel needs coal, both for electricity and the coking process. And Australia, which reportedly hatched this AP6 idea in the first place, and the U.S. are both big coal exporters looking to expand in the Asian and Indian markets.

It's not hard to connect the dots here. Nor is it difficult to see the attraction in joining the AP6 for someone like Stephen Harper especially.

Australia's biggest competitor in Asian steel markets is Alberta-based Fording Coal, the CPR spin off (annual revenues $2.1 billion) that mines one of the purest and hardest metallurgical coals in the world.

Joining AP6 gets Canada in on the ground in one of the niftiest buyer-meets-seller-meets-hi-tech-enviro marketplaces for coal extraction, power plant development, steel and aluminum mill construction and cement kilns for the fastest growing economies around.

It also allows Harper to showcase – and this is long overdue – the fact that Alberta is in fact one of the more innovative places in the world when it comes to curtailing greenhouse gas pollution and burning what is now being called "clean coal."

In fact, Alberta's Genesee 3 power plant is one of the cleanest in the world and one of the province's biggest greenhouse gas innovators is former EnCana chief Gwyn Morgan, the man who was supposed to have become Harper's new $1 a year guy in Ottawa if only the opposition parties hadn't intervened.

See Reality Check: The Gwyn Morgan debacle and a bout of prime ministerial petulance

Clean coal?

This is an idea whose time may have come. Even some prominent environmentalists who can't stomach the nuclear option (something Harper and Australia's Howard are also keen to promote) are urging clean coal technologies on a reluctant Ontario government to help with its electricity problems.

Still, clean coal is a concept that has to be taken with a grain of salt. Scientists, particularly in the U.S. where coal production is a big political consideration (read massive Washington investment), have come up with intriguing new ways to cut methane gases (a mine as well as atmospheric hazard), as well as capture CO2, mercury, sulphur oxide and nitrous oxides (these last two acid rain formers) before they are released into the environment.

The problem, though, especially for CO2, the largest and most ubiquitous of the greenhouse gases, is what to do with it once it's caught. It is still a gas. Technically it can be stored in containers or underground caverns. Norway has been injecting about a million tonnes a year of CO2 under the North Sea.

One of the neatest solutions, which EnCana was a big proponent of, is to pump it back into old oil beds deep underground, a process called geosequestration, to help push remaining oil deposits to the surface. But this is really only economically viable if the coal-fired generating plants are within a reasonably short pipeline distance from the oil fields. In other words, only in Western Canada and even then it seems only in exceptional circumstances.

Carrots or sticks?

At this point there are many creative ideas but no truly viable way of stripping the more substantive greenhouse gases from coal, or natural gas for that matter, and storing them easily for any length of time.

The Kyoto approach is to saddle countries with mandatory emission targets, which will force them to apportion these in turn among their major polluters. (Not an easy thing. And in Canada that means picking on Alberta a bit because its energy sector is one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters.)

These industries then have the choice of paying a penalty if they miss their targets, or buying the latest (geosequestration?) technology even if it is something that only adds to their costs.

AP6 wants to be more carrot than stick. Its market-driven proponents seem to feel that China and India in particular will want to use their new economic wealth to buy the latest climate-friendly technology from the West at the same time as they are loading up on boatloads of so-called clean coal.

And maybe they will. Maybe they will see the advantage in staying ahead of the technological curve and avoiding the respiratory and other health costs associated with too much short-sighted growth.

From Canada's point of view, it must be very tempting to join AP6 and be a potential seller of all this high-end environmental technology that we have been experimenting with for many years now. But at some point we are going to have to do our bit and start implementing a lot more of it ourselves.