Kyoto a no-go: Canada exits

There's a lot of press, and commentary, on Canada's long-anticipated withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol.
I've visited the International Energy Agency (IEA) site to grab a spreadsheet of CO2 Emissions from fuel combustion (the bulk of emissions), and done a couple of brief calculations to develop illustrations of why Canada exited Kyoto, and when we fell behind on our targets.

The Kyoto Protocol was signed in December of 1997.  It set a base year of 1990 - some would say because of the skill of negotiators from countries that didn't have growing GHG emission between 1990 and December 1997.  Especially countries with recovering eastern bloc ecosystems.



A look at the changes between 1990 and 1998 (essentially the difference between Kyoto's negotiation and it's retroactive base year) shows the decline of the overall Annex 1 parties, but a growth of 18% in Canada.

Between 1998 and 2009 (the final year of data in the IEA spreadsheet), Canada didn't perform much differently, although having a significant oil industry, we still had some growth.

Of particular note here, the United States emissions drop in this period, by 5%, while Annex 1 Kyoto parties decrease by only 2%!  The growth in emissions clearly shifts to the non-OECD region.

Much of the press has centred on how backwards our Prime Minister Harper is, so I'll conclude with the same graph, but for the period of only 2005-2009 (Harper was first elected PM in 2006), when the Non-OECD region grows to emit far more than OECD countries.