Canada is the only country to abandon and deliberately sabotage greenhouse targets under Kyoto and is going full-tilt on tar sands extraction. Their betrayal of Kyoto is directly linked to the forces there wanting to engage in the hideously destructive environmental degradation that is oil sands extraction.
Monbiot. Canada is now threat to world peace
So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petrostate. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.
Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of Neanderthals to trample over
I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?
Austraia’s PM John Howard also pulled out of Kyoto, though Kevin Rudd recently rejoined. Australia’s coal industry, which is massive, is a major CO2 contributor. This in a country that has faced drought for a decade and is forecast to have an 8 degree increase in temperature making it probably uninhabitable. Being blind is one thing but refusing to see is a crime.