A better comparison might be to compare Canada, USA, China, Brazil, Australia, and Russia. It’s one of the primary complaints about the whole Kyoto accord: it’s a cool idea on paper but doesn’t really reflect reality in the industrial and resource-based economies of the world, and for the third world, it’s just insane.

Very little of what happens in Canada compares to tiny countries like Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Austria, or Greece. Luxembourg could cut their emissions simply by offering people free bus tickets. Heavy industry is not a hallmark of any of those countries, so meeting their kyoto targets was probably relatively easy.

Sure, we could reduce emissions… just stop producing oil, reduce mining and logging by 50% and kill off the auto industry. Of course, we’ll all be paupers in a third-world country, but that’s a small price to pay for Kyoto!

We’re never going to meet Kyoto without a complete economic overhaul, and that’s just not doable in a handful of years. Frankly, it would have been better if we took the US approach and simply ignored Kyoto in the first place. Would have saved the embarrassment now.

So yeah, it can be done if the political will is there.

What really bugs me is that Prentice and Harper et al aren’t really even trying. My guess is that they still don’t believe that the climate is being impacted as a result of human activity. This puts them in the same club as Dubya and evangelical Christians who thinks that hordes of angels will descend from the skies above to rescue us before the climate really falls into the shitter…

Has any western country successfully cut its greenhouse gas emissions below even the previous year?