Tories still planning "intensity" targets

The Tories are still planning to bamboozle us with "intensity targets", according to a draft climate change plan obtained by the Globe and Mail. The article says:

The leaked government documents were analyzed for The Globe by two environmentalists: Louise Comeau of the Sage Foundation, who provided policy advice to the Liberal government for Mr. Dion's 2005 plan, and Matthew Bramley of the Pembina Institute, who recently released a proposal that would see oil sands companies comply with Kyoto by adding about $1 to the production cost of each barrel of oil.

"The federal government's proposal for industry regulation on greenhouse gases is a fraud," Ms. Comeau said. "Fabricating numbers so the current government's intensity approach looks better than the last government's intensity approach is no more acceptable today than it was two years ago. Intensity targets are dishonest. The time to regulate real reductions is now."

Now compare this approach, with what top scientists say is really needed:

Governments must pour tens of billions of dollars more than they are into clean energy research and enforce sharp rollback's in fossil fuel emissions if the world is to head off the worst of climate change, an expert scientific panel told the United Nations on Tuesday.

They said global carbon dioxide emissions should be levelled off by 2015-2020, and then cut back to less than one-third that level by 2100 - via a vast transformation of global energy systems toward greater efficiency and away from fossil fuels and toward biofuels, solar and wind energy and other renewable sources of energy.

That changeover would be spurred by heavy "carbon taxes" or "cap-and-trade" systems, whereby industries' emissions are capped by governments, and more efficient companies can sell unused allowances to less efficient ones.

Obviously, intensity targets will not achieve this, and Baird has rejected both a carbon tax and an emissions trading system.

All Harper cares about is getting re-elected with a majority. So, they'll try to "greenwash" us with a plan that does nothing, and then buy our votes with our own money (i.e. more tax cuts). The question is - are we dumb enough to fall for it?