Does agreeing to the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol serve Canada’s immediate and long term interests?

Answer 1

No it does not. If we the US had signed it we would be stupid.

Answer 2

No, the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol from the get go benefitted the European nations and then those who would receive money from the credit trading aspects of Kyoto.

Canada's economy has boomed since 1990, so to be able to reduce emissions to that point would mean to revamp all industries to minimize emissions by a grand total of nearly 30 - 40% of todays totals. To prevent a drop in our economy, we should have focused on the intensity not the totals that we produce. So yes, we could have even gone up with intensity drops of 50%, but that means that we just were growing faster. That would mean spending money on research and development for polluting industries to look at way of cheaply and effectively reducing their emissions. Over the long term, but focusing on intensity, we can reduce emissions to a point on nearly eradicating them, but environmentalists will always point out that your total emissions will continue to grow if your economy grows fast enough.

Meanwhile, places like China and India are going to surpass Canada easily in emissions and China will NEVER sign onto any accord, as they believe in emissions/capita, and that is far lower for them then total emissions. So Canadian industry needs to find cheap solutions to remain competitive instead of these expensive plans. Oh, and nuclear energy is a great solution for Kyoto, but the environmentalists hate it.