• Listen to this segment

• Listen to the entire program

On Monday just a day after climate change talks in Durban, South Africa ended with a whimper, Canada surprised the international community by pulling out of the Kyoto Treaty. Canada’s action drew criticism from home and abroad. The Canadian government cited the expense of offsetting a leap in carbon emissions by purchasing carbon emission permits as one reason to pull-out. It estimates meeting its 2012 Kyoto target would cost 14 billion Canadian dollars, or about $1600 dollars per household. Canada’s environmental minister Peter Kent said the withdrawal from the only legally binding international treaty on carbon emission, was “shameful.” China issued a statement calling the move “preposterous” and said buying permits, “is far less expensive than the cost of inaction.” Negotiations at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change concluded on Sunday in Durban with 194 nations agreeing to craft a new legally binding agreement to reduce pollution. The two week conference was focused on renewing the Kyoto treaty, which is set to expire next year, and on creating a new Green Climate Fund. Developing nations, well into their own industrial revolutions, want the same freedom to modernize and expand as the US and other developed nations. Janet Redman wrote from Durban last week, “[f]or hundreds of millions of poor Indians, the right to develop is the right to survival.” Redman said this means either growing emissions, or, “massive support from rich countries in the form of money and clean technology.” The US has been blamed for being obstructionist in climate change talks, with the Executive Director of Greenpeace Kumi Naidoo observing US negotiators make “derailing demands and [announce] commitments that barely survive the plane trip home.” Naidoo went on to state the US, “has reached a new low in refuting that scientific consensus demands urgent and rapid pollution reduction.”

GUESTS: Janet Redman, Co-director of the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies; Laura Carlsen Director, Mexico City-based Americas Program of the Center for International Policy, Columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus

Read Laura Carlsen’s article here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/08-1

Read Janet Redman’s blogs from Durban here (scroll to the bottom of the page): http://www.ips-dc.org/staff/janet