WASHINGTON – Who could blame her? After decades of walking a landscape of empty promises on climate change, Elizabeth May is taking time off for prayer.
The Green Party leader and MP from British Columbia is in town to participate in U.S. President Barack Obama’s annual National Prayer Breakfast with about 4,000 dignitaries from 103 countries.
She has been making the three-day pilgrimage for some years now. “There is no better opportunity to find out what is going on in the U.S. than those prayer breakfasts,” she says over a lunch of sushi, a meal she accidentally over-ordered turning a few fishes into the proverbial 5,000.
No problem. She tucks in with the customary high-energy enthusiasm she summons for just about everything. In between her sentences and paragraphs, the massive platter quickly dwindles to a handful and then a second arrives. Oh my! There goes the expense account.
She marvels at the irony of a Canadian politician indulging in the common American pastime of prayer.
“If you are a U.S. politician and you are not prepared to talk about your religious faith in Jesus Christ, you are not going to get elected,” she says, fast-talking between bites because she has only an hour before her next meeting. “In Canada if you do that your chances of getting re-elected are reduced.”
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]But she’s not here just to commune with the Holy Spirit. Her agenda is packed with meetings with U.S. lawmakers and environmental groups. The topic? Global climate change negotiations and Keystone, of course.
Her main goal: To persuade the U.S. to kill Keystone and to take a leadership role in putting global climate change negotiations back on track toward a final international agreement at the 2015 Congress of the Parties in Paris.
It’s clear, she says, that the negotiations have lost momentum and won’t move forward unless the world’s largest economy, biggest consumer of oil and second largest consumer of coal leads the way.
“The climate process multi-laterally is not getting the attention it needs if we are going to get anything done globally,” she says. “There is no leadership from anyone.”
“It is not possible to tell the difference between State Department negotiations under (former president George) W. Bush and State Department negotiations under Obama,” she says. “They are ragging the puck. They are delaying things. They are not sabotaging the way Canada does in negotiations, but they are not helpful.”
She said that Prime Minster Stephen Harper’s refusal to impose emission restrictions on the oilsands is – somewhat ironically – damaging prospects for Keystone.
“Canada’s commitment is to reduce its emissions by 130 megatons, but Environment Canada believes that by 2020 Canada will have reduced it only by three megatons,” she says.
“Contrast how (former prime minister Brian) Mulroney went about getting (U.S. president Ronald) Reagan to act on acid rain. The first step was to say this was what Canada has done on acid rain. We have taken these steps. We come to you with clean hands. We have already done it. Harper told Obama at one point we will bring in a climate plan if you give us Keystone.”
May’s opposition to Keystone is that it will help Harper’s goal of expanding oilsands production to six million barrels a day, from the current 1.8 million. She also believes the 1900-km pipeline is simply sending jobs to Texas refineries.
“This isn’t about whether we have oilsands or no oilsands,” she says. “I would prefer that we had roughly two million (barrels a day) and the jobs in Canada to upgrade the bitumen so that we don’t ship diluted bitumen to the U.S. to be refined. There are refineries in Canada that are under capacity.”
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]She also noted that before the great recession hit in 2007, oilsands companies had plans to build new upgraders. They were scratched. Now the plan is to export the raw bitumen.
“What kind of a country would do that?” she says, shrugging her shoulders in mock amazement.
Asked if she had gained any insight into Obama’s views on Keystone while in Washington, she said that a year ago Democrats thought he was leaning toward killing the project, now nobody seems to know where his decision will fall.
She takes a sip of tea, eyes the dozen or so sushi still on the platter. “I think I must have misread how many came in an order,” she says. She checks her watch. She’s late. Suddenly there’s a flourish of activity as she pushes back her chair, swoops up her coat and purse and heads for the door.
“Sorry.”
