"Climate change his historic oversight."

"Climate change his historic oversight" or so observed Australia's Sunday Telegraph after John Howard was resoundingly defeated by Kevin Rudd a labour politician determined to have Australia meet its Kyoto obligations.

While this may be the first major political upset direct attributable to anthropengically induced natural causes (ie the concentration of CO2 and other heat retaining gases), it may not be the last. Which makes the actions of Prime Minister Harper over the weekend even more interesting and, perhaps, foolhardy.

While the Australian voters were giving a seemingly ungrateful "thumbs down" to a Prime Minister who had delivered a heady cocktail of prosperity and full employment laced with fairly hefty tax breaks, Harper was persuading his Commonwealth peers not to agree to binding emission targets, seemingly oblivious to the fact that over two-thirds of the residents of Canada are now very worried about climate change. But in Uganda on Saturday Harper considered that he had done a good day's work by preventing the application of emissions reduction targets in the name of fairness. See article here.

Apparently, and according to Mr. Harper's logic, until all nations, notably USA and those real problems, India and China, sign up, emission targets aren't "fair" nor will they work. Mr. Harper seems to forget that the CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere have taken over 100 years to accumulate and originate from the era when those colonizing Europeans were marching across the Prairie displacing indigenous peoples and bringing progress to the savages. What was fair about that?

Not a day to be proud to be a Canadian.