Sustainability and policy - Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects - page 486

In December 2011, just following the COP meeting in Durban (see section 8.1.11),
Canada formally withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol. Canada will, however, continue
with international negotiations regarding Kyoto's successor. Meanwhile, as with
the USA, on a regional level in Canada there are initiatives to combat greenhouse
emissions.
With regards to long-term potential greenhouse issues, Canada has extensive oil
sands. These are more expensive and energy intensive to processes (which itself
releases considerable greenhouse gas). As the world supply of cheap oil diminishes
and oil prices rise, Canada has the potential to be a major oil producer. As the IPCC's
scenarios are largely based on conventional oil futures, and less on extensive future
harnessing of unconventional fossil fuels such as tar sands, there is potential for
Canada, along with other nations producing expensive unconventional fossil fuel, to
contribute to global warming beyond that which it forecasts later this century.
8.3.3 Casestudy:UK
The average UK citizen produces just over half as much carbon dioxide as their US
counterparts (see Figure 7.1), but far less as a nation, as its population is just less
than a quarter of the USA's. In fossil fuel terms the UK consumes (in 2011) around
200 mtoe compared to the US consumption of 2300 mtoe. As such, in fossil carbon
terms it is (loosely speaking) broadly representative of Western European nations,
although it uses slightly more fossil fuel per capita than most others. By 2009 in
Europe only Germany as a nation consumed more fossil carbon than the UK. The
UK is also roughly similar in fossil carbon terms to Japan and so can be considered
to be part of a group of nations that represent a halfway house between our US case
study and the large developing nations.
Perhaps the single reason why the UK is less fossil carbon-intensive per capita
than the USA is due to oil tax. Notwithstanding this, the USA is far larger than
the UK and so expends more energy on transport, and historically it has a higher
proportion of energy devoted to air conditioning. Factors such as historically poor car
fuel efficiency have also played their parts in determining the intensity of fossil fuel
use. Automobile petrol has throughout the post-World War II period been cheaper
in the USA than the UK by, very broadly (allowing for exchange-rate fluctuations),
some 38% (see Table 8.4).
The UK saw considerable fuel switching throughout the 20th century and
towards the century's end it strove for energy sustainability (meaning, in this case,
self-sufficiency), albeit with only limited success as far as the very early 21st century
is concerned.
Following World War II UK energy policy (such as it was) focused on recovery from
the war's rationing years and then in the 1960s in reducing acid emissions from coal
burning (mainly in domestic homes and then in electricity power stations). However,
it was the 1973 oil crisis that prompted much debate over energy sustainability,
possibly more so than in the USA, which had not seen its imports threatened during
the war, as had Britain. In the years that followed 1973 the UK Department of Energy
produced a number of Energy Papers, number 22 of which specifically dealt with
national energy policy (Department of Energy, 1977). It defined the energy-policy