Canada Trip Is Big Test of Obama Climate Policy

President Obama's trip north to talk tar sands with the Canadian prime minister is a big test of how deep his climate policy will bite, and how successful he will be on the international stage in drawing world leaders together to confront climate action.

The stakes are high, and that's why he's taking with him Gen. Jim Jones, his national security advisor; Larry Summers, the chairman of the National Economic Council; and Carole Browner, the White House's energy and climate coordinator.

The Obama administration has already earned high marks for steps to promote clean energy and pave the way to a low carbon economy, thanks to the green components of the economic stimulus package and bold moves by the EPA. Now comes the hard part: slowing and stopping continued investments in dirty energy. The Canadians are counting on the U.S. failing to break its addiction, and they're offering the Alberta tar sands to feed the need.

The tar sands is the biggest energy project on the earth and one of its dirtiest. In a full page ad that ran in USA Today, Forest Ethics (source of the accompanying illustration) described the project's impact this way:

Producing oil from Canada's Tar Sands releases massive greenhouse gas emissions, consumes huge amounts of energy, contaminates fresh water and fish, produces toxic wastes and destroys vast forests along with their birds and wildlife. And now, downstream indigenous communities are suffering higher than normal rates of cancer.

Even so, Canada understands its economic future to be synonymous with exploiting the tar sands and has shown no intention of honoring even the mild emission reductions its commitment to the Kyoto Protocol requires. When Obama crosses the border to meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he's essentially going to be negotiating with the Bush-Cheney administration in a kinder, gentler Canadian exterior but oil-soaked to its core.

Since the U.S. pulled out of Kyoto, the American public has been led to believe that the obstacle to a climate treaty is China, for Bush pointed at China and said no deal unless they promise reductions, too. The real problem is actually much closer to home. If Obama can't bring Canada on board the climate bandwagon, there's little chance that China or India will be persuaded to pursue clean development, that the EU will do anything remotely adequate, that Australia will curb its coal-based export prosperity, and so on, and a global solution will become impossible. 

That's why Obama was careful to frame his responses to an interview with CBC in global terms. When asked if he thought the tar sands was "dirty oil," he avoided the trap and framed his response this way instead:

... the dilemma that Canada faces, the United States faces, China and the entire world faces is how do we obtain the energy that we need to grow our economies in a way that is not rapidly accelerating climate change.

I think that what I’m suggesting is that no country in isolation is going to be able to solve this problem. So Canada, the United States, China, India, the European Union, all of us are going to have to work together in an effective way to figure out how do we balance the imperatives of economic growth with very real concerns about the effect we’re having on our planet.  

He also showed his savvy. Canadian industry and government are framing the tar sands issue as a choice between "dirty oil" from Alberta or "bloody oil" from the Middle East. Indeed, Preston Manning, a conservative elder statesman of Canadian politics, skillfully laid out this stark choice in a Globe and Mail op-ed last week.