The plan, entitled Turning the Corner, says that by 2020, the government hopes it will have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 150 million tonnes, or 20 per cent of current emissions.
The government will mandate strict targets for industry to reduce greenhouse gases, Baird says in his speech.
But to meet those targets, he adds, firms will be able to:
* Make in-house reductions.
* Take advantage of domestic emissions trading.
* Purchase "offsets."
* Use the Clean Development Mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol.
* Invest in a technology fund.
The government says it will also impose stringent targets on industry to cut air pollution in half by 2015, the speech says.
Uh huh. So, we have, once again, a Conservative government setting targets over a decade into the future, and now they are falling back to mechanisms described in the Kyoto protocol itself - you know, the one they keep saying would be "economically devastating" to Canada.
I'm not so deluded as to believe that changes are going to happen overnight. But as has been typical of this government from the get-go on the Environment portfolio, we find once again that the CPoC is trying to deflect attention away from a series of 'do nothing' targets that they think they can safely ignore - likely until they are well and gone from office.
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