Canada Sued for Breach of Kyoto Treaty
I love this. Canadian citizens as part of an environmental group called Friends of Canada are suing their country for breech of the Kyoto Treaty. Out of 180 countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol, Canada is the first to be brought to court for neglecting its legal commitment to fight global warming.
Canada’s government is conservative right now and evidently playing to big business polluters. Sounds like the U.S. As the chief exec of Friends of Earth stated: ‘While other industrialized countries actively work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change, our government has offered pollution holidays for emitters for decades to come.’
So Canadians are taking their country to court over the environment. I wonder if they’re going to get specific and if it will affect Canada’s drilling for oil in the Great Lakes? The Friends of Canada exec said: ‘This government has broken the law [] and, as Canadian citizens, we have both a moral and legal imperative to insist on enforcement of our own laws on climate action.’
Geez, I wish Bush would have signed the Kyoto Treaty. He slid away from it with a promise to enforce our own environmental laws. We see what happened there.
This is going to be pretty interesting. It’s setting a precedent for one, and it could force the Canadian government to come up with detailed plans on how they plan to lower their emissions six percent below 1990 levels. This is legally binding but Canada says it cannot meet that goal. It seems to me the more a government monkeys around and stalls on actively and earnestly trying to produce alternative sources for energy the more impossible it is to meet specific goals that will curb catastrophic events down the line.
Mother Nature certainly isn’t going to wait around for us to figure out how to conserve. Look at the floods in corn country. It kinda puts a damper on massive ethanol production. We’re still not getting who is in charge here. The environment trumps just about everything. We absolutely need the cooperation of weather for so many things. Maybe gas prices are high to truck food to us, but without the cooperation of the climate, there simply won’t be any food to truck. There isn’t much we can do about Mother Nature. We can’t shoot missiles at her. We can’t blow her up. We can’t place embargos on her. There isn’t much we can do to Mother Nature except abuse or nurture her. If we decide to nurture, we make our own paradise where we live in harmony with our world and everything in it. Or we can continue the abuse until MN kills us out of self defense.
Read more: http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2008/2008-06-18-02.asp
June 29th, 2008 at 12:03 am
FYI - treaties are never legally binding like “law” is. If the terms of a treaty are “violated” by a signatory then the treaty is defacto null and voided by that signatory. No crackpot Canadian can “sue” Canada for breaking the Kyoto agreement, and MotherNature will be just fine.
July 1st, 2008 at 8:37 pm
FYI-you’re going by U.S. understanding of treaty. We’ve done a shabby job in our history honoring treaties so maybe that’s where you get the idea it’s alright everywhere else.
A treaty is an agreement under international law entered into by actors in international law, namely states and international organizations. A Treaty may also be known as: (international) agreement, protocol, covenant, convention, exchange of letters, accord, exchange of notes, memorandum of understanding, etc. Regardless of the terminology, all of these international agreements under international law are equally treaties and the rules are the same. (Note that in United States constitutional law, the term “treaty” has a special meaning which is more restricted than its meaning in international law; see below.)
Treaties can be loosely compared to contracts: both are means of willing parties assuming obligations among themselves, and a party to either that fails to live up to their obligations can be held liable under international law for that breach. The central principle of treaty law is expressed in the maxim pacta sunt servanda— “pacts must be respected”.
And these aren’t crackpots. It’s happening.
A lawsuit would invoke the Canadian Environmental Protection Act to force the minister to uphold Canada’s international obligations to control air pollution, Olivastri noted.
The Friends of the Earth said its legal opinion would also be submitted to the Kyoto Protocol Compliance Committee to add weight to a complaint already lodged by South Africa over Canada’s failure to report “demonstrable progress to reduce GHG emissions” in 2005.
If Canada is found to be non-compliant, it faces an additional 30 percent reduction penalty and its ability to trade emissions credits would be suspended, hampering its options to meet its Kyoto target.
http://www.petroleumworld.com/story06110105.htm