Canada

TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline is losing popular support in Canada, a development that could embolden opponents of the project, according to a poll released today by Nanos Research Group.

Whenever I travel abroad these days, I'm button-holed by anxious foreigners asking the same question: What happened to the civil, generous and globally engaged Canada? My answer is blunt: An old mining republic with the reputation of a Dr. Jekyll has now banked its economic future on dirty oil. In the process, gentle Canada has become a bullying Mr. Hyde.

Canada's carbon emissions will soar 38% by 2030 mainly due to expanding tar sands projects, according to the government's own projections.In a new report to the United Nations, the Harper administration says it expects emissions of 815million tonnes of CO2 in 2030, up from 590Mt in 1990.

My community is largely based in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, 200 km downstream from current tar sands development. It's a place of great beauty and history, but we are now at risk from irreversible impacts that will permanently change our lands and our lives forever. In July of 2010, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) Elders Council issued a declaration on our rights under agreements made over a century ago.

Five environmental groups, including the David Suzuki Foundation and the Wilderness Committee, are taking the federal government to court, claiming it has failed to meet its responsibilities under the Species at Risk Act to protect endangered wildlife threatened by the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. The case will be heard by the Federal Court in Vancouver Jan.

Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions will rise sharply after 2020 unless there are dramatic efforts to rein in emissions from the oil and gas sector, the Harper government indicates in a new report to the United Nations.

The document was submitted to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in late December with no announcement or press release. As it was being filed, Prime Minister Stephen Harper signalled his government was delaying for as long as two years the release of long-promised regulations to reduce emissions from the booming oil-sands sector.

Cornell’s Charles H. Greene, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, and Bruce C. Monger, senior research associate in the same department, detail this phenomenon in a paper published in the June issue of the journal Oceanography. “Everyone thinks of Arctic climate change as this remote phenomenon that has little effect on our everyday lives,” Greene said. “But what goes on in the Arctic remotely forces our weather patterns here.”

A glaring observation that emerges from this ice storm is the vulnerability of human populations when their electrical service is dependent on complex and capital-intense electricity grids transporting electricity over large distances. This underscores what advocates for science and the humans are increasingly arguing--human society urgently needs to rapidly reduce its energy consumption and waste, end the burning of fossil fuels, switch to renewable energy sources, and localize energy production and distribution to the maximum extent possible.

It’s unlikely the storm could be directly linked to changes in weather patterns caused by global warming. But the social crisis it has prompted does portend the kind of scenario for which populations and emergency planners will need to prepare as the frequency and intensity of weather events increase and as ocean levels rise. So how is Toronto faring?

According to Toronto Star columnist Joe Fiorito, the city’s administration had no emergency meeting and coordination center with an emergency power supply ready to go. It had to scramble to hold its first meeting.

In 2011, the signatories to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees failed to tackle the reality of climate migration, and Canada neglected to sign up for the 2012 Nansen Initiative (launched by Norway and Switzerland), which is set to publish a report in 2015 providing recommendations on the issue.

“There are these countries in the West which aren’t really doing anything in terms of international agreements,’’ Cap U’s Schreader says. ‘‘I don’t see Canada playing a lead role in the status of climate migrants.’’