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Justin Sullivan

Throughout the Copenhagen climate summit, The Globe will collect excerpts from international media coverage of Canada's position on climate change.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, United States

Dec. 15

"The victim of a well-executed hoax at the Copenhagen climate conference on Monday, the Canadian government was hit by a leak of the truth Tuesday as the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. exposed a plan by the government to abandon its own greenhouse reduction goals.

A key part of the plan is to allow projected growth in greenhouse gas emissions from the huge oil sands project in northern Alberta to increase 165 percent by 2020. The government would ask industry to cut the growth of pollution -- not the quantity of emissions - by just 10 percent."

The Daily Telegraph, United Kingdom

Dec. 15

"Over the last few days, anti-Canada sentiment has become more vocal. A group of 11 members of the European parliament this week wrote to the chief executives of BP, Shell, Total and others, urging them to withdraw from the Alberta area. Someone even managed to issue a fake press release - picked up by several journalists - falsely alleging that Canada had pledged to a 40pc cuts in emissions and an end to their dirty oil dream.

Over in London, climate protestors scaled the Canadian embassy, cut loose the national flag and dunked it into a barrel of crude. Meanwhile, campaigners Al Gore and Naomi Klein both branded companies active in the Alberta oil fields "climate criminals" at the conference."

The Irish Times, Ireland

Dec. 15

"This year's "bottom-of-the-barrel finishers" were Canada and Saudi Arabia. The Canadian government delayed the announcement of any major new climate policies in advance of Copenhagen, ensuring that Canada won second-to-last place for the second year in a row.

Brazil and Britain ranked high in this year's index, mainly because they had both adopted "progressive domestic climate legislation". While the US under President Barack Obama took "a small step up the ladder", it remains in a very low position - 53rd."

The Guardian, United Kingdom

Dec. 14

"The Yes Men - or somebody suspiciously like them have struck again and this time the victim was Canada.

And who better? The Canadians have emerged as the villain of the climate change negotiations for pumping out greenhouse gas emissions with the full-on exploitation of the Alberta tar sands."

The Guardian, United Kingdom

Dec. 14

"The Inuit people who live in and around the Arctic are among the worst victims of global warming, and scientists are now turning to their experience and indigenous knowledge to understand the staggering effects of climate change.

"The Arctic is at the epicentre of climate change. Inuit traditions and subsistence practices have already been assaulted," stated the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) in a call for action at the 15th Conference of Parties (CoP15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, underway in the Danish capital."

The Star, Malaysia

Dec. 13

"There is one similarity among these communities that are at the frontline of climate change - they and their ancestors did not cause the present problem. And they are too poor to be able to adapt to the drastic changes around them.

They felt betrayed when rich countries, like the United States, Canada, the European Union, Australia and Japan, which had built their high-carbon economies over the centuries, reneged on their promises under the Kyoto Protocol to cut their emissions, provide funds and technologies. And the US is not even a signatory of the Kyoto Protocol."

The Boston Globe, United States

Dec. 13

"North of Canada's capital, underneath an endless expanse of spruce, pine, and birch, ticks what some scientists are calling a carbon bomb: Peat.

A thick layer of the black spongy soil, the remnants of ancient forests, wraps the globe's northern tier. Deeper than 15 feet in places, the peat layer extends over more than 6 million square miles across Russia, Scandinavia, China, Canada, and the United States."

Reuters/The New York Times

Dec. 11

"Inuit communities need funds to adapt to climate change in the Arctic, including measures to build communal deep freezers to store game because warming is reducing their hunting season, an Inuit leader said on Friday.

The Inuit, the indigenous people of Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Russia, have traditionally hunted for Arctic species from seal to polar bear, whale to caribou.

"In Canada we see climate changes on a day to day basis," said Violet Ford, a Canadian official of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC)."

Financial Times, United Kingdom

Dec. 11

"European leaders on Friday sought to play down their differences and instead shift the focus on to other developed nations - particularly the US and Canada.

"If others move forward, we will move up to 30 per cent," said Fredrik Reinfeldt, prime minister of Sweden, which holds the rotating EU presidency."

ClimateWire/The New York Times

Dec. 10

"At ongoing talks in Copenhagen, whether and how forest and land credits are included in an ultimate agreement remains a significant obstacle in the negotiations, experts say. The goal is to nail down the rules before world leaders are pressed to agree to overall targets and baselines next week.

Environmentalists are worried that some developed nations, including several heavily forested E.U. nations, Canada, Russia and New Zealand, will succeed in various attempts to secure favorable rules that leave potential for gaming the system. The proposals deal with everything from how to count carbon from croplands, soils and tree plantations to whether countries should be held accountable for their forest fires."

The South Florida Sun Sentinel, United States

Dec. 8

"And it's not just the nasty countries. Canada, the Dudley Do-Right of the international community, insists on exploiting its vast and dirty oil reserves in the so-called "tar sands" under Alberta. The intro to an article by British eco-scold George Monbiot declared: "Canada"s image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is to whaling." If Canada, which has long been the U.N.'s Richie Cunningham, won't play ball, does anyone think the Chinese, Indians or Brazilians will?"

The New York Times, United States

Dec. 7

"When coastal marshes are drained, soils ploughed or peat lands burned, the carbon stored there is exposed to oxygen with which it forms CO2 and finds its way into the atmosphere. There it persists for a long time, trapping heat as a greenhouse gas.

Adding insult to injury, these land-use conversions also destroy natural carbon sinks. For example, most carbon accumulated in coastal marshlands does not find its way into the atmosphere. A recent calculation shows that had the Bay of Fundy marshlands in Canada not been converted to farmland, they would be absorbing the equivalent to 4 to 6 per cent of Canada's CO2 reduction target."

The New York Times, United States

Dec. 7

"In the evening, it was time for the announcement of the Fossil of the Day awards.

Since 1999, that dubious honor has been doled out each day at annual climate talks. Environmentalists vote for the country judged to have made the most outstanding effort to block progress in negotiations.

Clad in a tuxedo, Ben Wikler of Cambridge, Mass., announced that Canada had come in third. He cited statements before the conference by Canada's environment minister, Jim Prentice, that the "hype" around the event would not sway the country to bolster its emission targets."

BBC, United Kingdom

Dec. 6

"Delegations from 192 countries are arriving in Copenhagen for two weeks of talks aimed at establishing a new global treaty on climate change.

Among those attending are the Canadian Inuit, who have called for tough new emissions targets and extra funding to help adapt to global warming."

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The New York Times, United States Dec. 6

"Canada has the largest crude oil deposits in the world after Saudi Arabia, and the biggest in the Western Hemisphere. But approaching the United Nations climate change conference, which takes place over the next two weeks, it has found that the bounty makes it enemies as well as friends.

"Critics portray it as a 'dirty oil' producer that has abandoned its commitments under the 1997 Kyoto climate change treaty and has fallen short in the fight to reduce climate-altering carbon emissions.

"By ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, in 2002, Canada's previous Liberal government pledged that it would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent from 1990 levels over the period from 2008 to 2012. The present Conservative government, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and in power since 2006, has, however, disowned that policy, substituting instead a commitment to reduce emissions by 20 percent from 2006 levels by 2020 - a modest target that has been widely panned by Canadian environmentalists."

The Daily Star, Lebanon Dec. 5

"Results of a recent survey carried out by the US-based Pew Research Center revealed that the opinions of those who live in countries that emit the bulk of the greenhouse-gas emissions will need to change if we are to ever reach a common framework to address the issue. According to the poll, a distressing proportion of the populations of industrialized countries do not appear to grasp the magnitude of the catastrophe looming over the horizon. In the United States, the survey found a whopping 56 percent of the population does not think global warming is a very serious problem. In Canada, another country whose production of greenhouse gas is infinitely superior to its share of the world population, 53 percent of the population reportedly believed global warming was not a very serious issue."

The Guardian, United Kingdom Nov. 30

"When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world's peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country's government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee's tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I've broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

"So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

"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. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works."

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