Monbiot has hissy fit and calls Canada a 'corrupt petro-state'
Cathal Kelly
British journalist and environmental activist George Monbiot took aim at Canada's climate policies today, calling this country a "corrupt petro-state" whose government behaves with "the sophistication of a chimpanzee's tea party."
Monbiot's column in London's The Guardian is one of the most influential intellectual platforms in Europe. He is in Toronto today, slated to debate climate change at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies tonight.
On the eve of his appearance, he fired a fusillade at the Harper government from his journalistic perch. He writes that he is so appalled by Canada's climate policy that he has broken a self-imposed ban on flying in order to come to Toronto (jumbo jets are far and away the worst transportation emitters of climate-destroying carbon).
The piece is titled, in part, "(Canada) is now to climate what Japan is to whaling."
"Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada," Monbiot writes. "Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works."
The column comes just as the international spotlight shifts to Denmark, where the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference is set to begin on Monday.
The greatest target of Monbiot's wrath is Alberta's oilsands, a multibillion-dollar investment that represents the second-largest deposit of oil on Earth. Extracting the oil is a dirty, expensive business, and has long outraged environmental activists.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has come under harsh domestic and international criticism for his laissez faire attitude to carbon emissions reduction. At Copenhagen, Canada is promising to reduce emissions to 20 per cent below 2006 levels by 2020. The U.S. is promising a similar cut. Climate change scientists have called for a far more drastic reduction. In his book, Heat, Monbiot called for an immediate 95 per cent-plus reduction by developed nations.
A recent Harris-Decima poll showed that two-thirds of Canadians believe that global warming is the "defining" crisis of our time. A similar number thought that mankind will rise to meet it.
"It feels odd to be writing this," Monbiot closes his scathing column. "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."
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