Prime Minister Stephen Harper says it premature to be demanding climate-change goals of other countries, but he hopes that the participants at this weekend's APEC conference can at least agree those goals must be set.
"We haven't reached the point where we can dictate targets to the rest of the world," the Prime Minister told a late afternoon press conference on Friday.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard and U.S. President George Bush want the 21 nations that are members of the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum to agree in principle to the setting of emission reduction targets at some point after other national conferences. And they want developing nations like China, which are some of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, to be signatories to the agreement.
Mr. Harper pointed out that the reduction targets set out in the Kyoto Accord — targets that his government rejects as being too costly to the environment — were never approved by countries that produce two third's of the world's emissions. And he said he believes that a G8 meeting held last June in Berlin produced the most reasonable approach to cutting the production of the gases that have been linked to global warming.
"Canada, Japan and others have articulated a specific goal that we would like to see which is a reduction of emissions by half by the year 2050. Not everybody even in the G8 yet subscribes to that," said Mr. Harper.
"I think if we got the same kind of statement here that suggests that there has to be a goal and everybody has to be involved in reaching that goal, I think we will have made progress."
Mr. Harper took to the world stage Friday to lambaste the climate-change record of former Liberal governments and to reaffirm his commitment to balancing environmental action with economic sustainability.
The Prime Minister was one of five international leaders — along with the heads of Russia, China, Chile and the United States — who were invited to address APEC summit, a meeting of about 200 business and political officials that preceded the meeting of APEC leaders this weekend.
In a draft version of the speech handed out before he took the stage, Mr. Harper spoke in strong terms about the need for action to reduce the emission of greenhouse, calling global warming one of the most important international public-policy challenges of our time.
"Canada wants to be a world leader in the fight against climate change and in the development of clean energy," said Mr. Harper, who blamed past policies for stymieing those goals.
"For at least a decade most governments, including Canada's government, paid what can charitably be called lip service to the issue of climate change," he told the international forum. "Because they were unwilling to tell the public that reducing carbon emissions must entail real economic costs in the short term, governments responded to the problem with little more than political rhetoric."
The Prime Minister, who five years ago dismissed the science that linked emissions to climate change as tentative and contradictory, said "the weight of scientific evidence holds that our atmosphere is getting hotter and that human activity is a significant contributor."
The physical evidence, he said, can be found in the expanding amount of open water in the Northwest Passage and the mild British Columbia winters that have created ideal conditions for pine-beetle infestations.
But unless countries strike a balance between environmental protection and economic prosperity, the environment will never be given the priority it should, he said.
"We need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions with strategies that are comprehensive, practical and realistic," the Prime Minister said.
There must be clear goals for all major emitters, he said, but they must be fair and economically realistic, they must not unduly burden any single country, they must be flexible so that countries can choose their own policies, and they must support the development of better technologies.
