Former negotiator says Canada blocking Durban climate talks

By Mike De Souza, Postmedia News
4 December 2011 DURBAN, South Africa – A retired Canadian government negotiator who worked on one of the world’s most successful environmental treaties says that Canada’s negotiating tactics at international climate change talks are impeding progress, while protecting the interests of a single industry. “I’m not so sure the objective is to achieve progress,” said Vic Buxton, 68. “I think the objective appears to me to be to make sure nothing is put in place in an international regulatory sense that can impede economic development in the Alberta tarsands.” Buxton, reached by phone in Ottawa, was one of the key figures representing Canada in the 1987 Montreal Protocol negotiations to restrict pollution that depletes the Earth’s ozone layer, which protects life from the sun’s harmful radiation. Like the Kyoto Protocol on climate change from 1997, the Montreal agreement was founded on a principle that developed countries were responsible for creating an environmental issue and should therefore pay most of the costs to fix the problem they caused. But Environment Minister Peter Kent has challenged this principle, arguing that emerging economies such as China, India, and Brazil should not get special treatment since they are among the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions that trap heat in the atmosphere and cause global warming. He has indicated Canada will not take on new targets to reduce pollution under Kyoto in 2013 after it failed to make efforts to meet its existing targets during the first commitment period of the agreement between 2008 and 2012. But Kent has also mused about withdrawing altogether from the treaty without confirming or denying rumours that Canada will do this after the conference ends. The situation has angered many delegations at the Durban climate talks who are urging the Canadian government to be more transparent about its intentions. In an interview last week, Mohau Pheko, the high commissioner to Canada for the conference’s host country of South Africa, accused Kent of “bullying” poorer countries as part of an apparent lobbying effort to kill the Kyoto treaty. […]