Analysis: Canada's Kyoto withdrawal began when Bush bolted (Reuters)

OTTAWA (Reuters) ? Canada's widely criticized withdrawal from the Kyoto protocol ends a decade-long saga that began in earnest when former President George W. Bush walked away from the global climate change treaty in 2001.

The close links between the two economies, and the fact the United States has a population almost 10 times larger than that of Canada, meant that Ottawa ultimately felt it had to follow Washington's lead and ignore the diplomatic fallout.

"That's the reality. If the Americans move we'll move in lock-step with them because of the integrated nature of the economies," said Fen Hampson, director of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Canada is the largest supplier of oil and gas to the United States and sends 75 percent of its exports south each month. Even though the right-of-center ruling Conservatives are closer ideologically to the Republicans than the Democrats, they rarely differ with the Americans on major economic issues.

Echoing complaints by Washington, Canada's Conservative government - a firm backer of the energy industry - insists that Kyoto is no use in the battle against global warming because it does not cover major emitters such as China and India.

"There's not going to be traction on climate change until the Chinese and the Americans and the Indians decide that they really want to do something," Hampson told Reuters.

"The (Canadian) government saw this dead cow wasn't moving so they pulled the plug on it," he said.

Canada, which made the announcement immediately after two weeks of talks that extended Kyoto, says it is ready to negotiate a new deal covering all major polluters. Whether other nations are interested in talking to Canada is another matter.

"At the multilateral level, who will ever think we're a trustworthy nation again? ... We will be seen as a country that deals in bad faith," said Elizabeth May, leader of Canada's Green Party, referring to Monday's announcement.

Even so, diplomats questioned whether Canada would suffer immediate fallout from its decision, given existing doubts about the usefulness of Kyoto and a crisis gripping the European Union, the treaty's biggest backer.

Paul Heinbecker, a top diplomat who helped negotiate Canada's accession to the protocol, told Reuters that Canada should have stayed in Kyoto and helped negotiate a new deal.

"How do we now tell other people that they have to live by the next one if we pull out of the first one?" he said.

Yet he too blamed Bush for Kyoto's main challenges.

"In my judgment the person who really torpedoed this whole enterprise was George Bush. Had the Americans participated ... by now there would be enormous pressure on the Chinese and the Indians to be accepting targets," he said.

Bush's move in 2001 caused big problems for Canada's then-Liberal government, which was stuck with the need to curb emissions while facing complaints from industry groups that the proposed cuts would give U.S. competitors an unfair advantage.

In 2002, Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said ratifying Kyoto would cut gross domestic product by up to 2.5 percent by 2010.

The Liberals, themselves split over Kyoto, produced a widely panned strategy in 2002.

"Part of the plan rested on having new North American standards for cars and with George Bush in the White House that wasn't going to happen," said John Bennett, executive director of the Sierra Club Canada.

The Liberals played for time and did not produce a credible plan until 2005. In early 2006 they lost power to the Conservatives, who made clear they would ignore the Kyoto commitments and eventually decided to pull Canada out.

The Canadian government's current plan, which would cut emissions by 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2020, is almost identical to the strategy of President Barack Obama.

Yet Ottawa's Kyoto move might hamper Obama's push to allow the Environmental Protection Agency to limit greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, according to one critic.

"If this international process is going to take a very long time ... why would we be imposing these Obama regulations on the economy that would devastate it for no gain?" said Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Senator James Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate's environment committee and a long-time climate skeptic.

Polls show Obama faces a tough fight to win another four-year term in the White House in a November 2012 election.

(With additional reporting by Timothy Gardner in Washington; Editing by Frank McGurty)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111213/wl_nm/us_kyoto_withdrawal

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Andrew Fieldhouse: Paying for a Jobs Bill by Cutting Federal Jobs?

Earlier this week, Senate Republicans rolled out their proposal for financing an extension of the Social Security payroll tax cut scheduled to expire at the end of December. Disappointingly, the conservative counteroffer is to pay for this job creation measure by cutting federal employees' jobs and wages. The "pay-for" proposed by Senate Democrats -- a 3.25 percent surtax on the 1-in-500 households earning over $1 million -- for an expansion of the payroll tax cut is anathema to conservatives; Senate Republicans have already filibustered a litany of job-creation proposals that would be financed by varying millionaire surtaxes. Last night, the Senate Republicans filibustered yet another such jobs package -- both the proposed extension and expansion were rejected in the Senate.

The Senate Republican proposal would limit federal agencies to hiring only one replacement employee for every three full-time employees leaving the agency until employment has fallen by 10 percent. This would result in roughly 280,000 job losses -- ironic, given that the purpose of the payroll tax cut is to create jobs. Someone should remind the GOP that the purpose of a pay-for is to offset the cost of a policy, not its impact.

Laying off hundreds of thousands of federal workers is terrible policy for reasons beyond causing job loss during a jobs crisis. First, it ignores the need to keep up with a growing population. These civil service jobs deemed unnecessary by Senate Republicans include one out of 10 federal judges, FBI agents, Veterans Affairs doctors, National Institutes of Health cancer researchers, food safety inspectors, and air traffic controllers, to name just a few.

Second, haphazardly cutting certain agencies' payroll would in many cases actually increase the budget deficit. Fewer Internal Revenue Service auditors would mean less tax enforcement and revenue. (In fiscal year 2010, 22,710 full-time IRS enforcement officers brought in $58 billion -- an average of over $2.5 million per employee.) Fewer Medicare fraud investigators would mean more erroneous payments and unprosecuted fraudulent claims. Fewer employees at the Security and Exchange Commission would mean less enforcement of insider trading laws and greater incidences of financial fraud. As Brad Plumber points out, the SEC lost 10 percent of its staff between 2005 and 2007, even as the financial system's rise in complexity would have justified a larger workforce. Small wonder the agency was unable to adequately identify financial institutions at risk of collapse or uncover Bernard Madoff's multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

The Republican proposal would also freeze federal employees' pay through 2015, extending a two-year freeze by another three years. Based on the Congressional Budget Office's economic projections that would mean an 8.3 percent real wage cut for all federal employees over five years. The bill also symbolically proposed barring millionaires from receiving unemployment insurance and food stamps, and, less symbolically, would raise Medicare premiums for millionaires. (These mandatory savings account for only four percent of the proposed spending cut -- the real money comes at the expense of federal workers, not millionaires.)

The proposal would book "savings" for this reduction in federal payroll be downwardly revising the discretionary spending caps for the second phase of the Budget Control Act (i.e., the debt ceiling deal) by $222 billion. If Congress allows the automatic sequestration cut to be triggered for 2013, the $109 billion cut for fiscal 2013 would come from this lower spending baseline. The unbalanced, spending-cuts-only approach to deficit reduction set in place by the Budget Control Act would be made even more lopsided.

The Senate Democratic proposal would raise $265 billion for an expanded payroll tax cut, leading to accelerated GDP growth going into 2012. Employees' payroll tax rates would fall from 4.2 percent in 2011 to 3.1 percent in 2012 (instead of reverting to 6.2 percent as scheduled) and businesses would see reduced payroll tax rates for the first $5 million in payroll and limited expansions of payroll. The Senate Republican proposal would finance a $120 billion extension of the existing two percentage point payroll tax cut, which would leave the GDP accounts unchanged relative to current budget policy, with $231 billion in spending cuts. This would create an unnecessary drag on economic growth for two reasons. First, it would cut spending by significantly more than needed to offset the cost of the tax cuts. Second, while permanent tax increases on upper-income houses have relatively little impact on near-term economic activity, government spending cuts have a very adverse impact on growth and employment during periods of depressed economic activity.

The dog and pony show that was the super committee made clear that the 112th Congress is incapable of breaching a deep ideological rift over taxation and how to address the long-term budget deficit. If Democrats and Republicans can only agree that temporarily increasing middle-class paychecks is good for a weak economy, there is a third option for Congress: it should simply pass the tax cut without any offsets. After all, Congress didn't pay for last year's $858 billion tax deal that extended the Bush tax cuts for high-earners (tax cuts averaging $22,000 for households making more than $200,000). So why must we now insist on paying for an extension of a significantly cheaper middle-class tax cut? The only compelling reason to negotiate a payroll tax cut pay-for is to set the precedent that the Bush-era tax cuts only get extended if fully paid for. And voters didn't seem to like the $4.5 trillion pay-for proposed in the House Republican budget.

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Follow Andrew Fieldhouse on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@EconomicPolicy

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-fieldhouse/federal-jobs-payroll-tax_b_1126215.html

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Video: A look at Cain?s crash and burn campaign

Think you're too old to travel? Think again

Some companies are beginning to offer travel companion services for seniors, modeled after programs airlines currently have in place for unaccompanied minors, to help grandma or grandpa safely get where they are going and back home again.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/vp/45559793#45559793

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Video: PFT Live: Denver WR says Tebow keeps getting better

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Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/21134540/vp/45556067#45556067

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FAA head Randy Babbitt charged with drunk driving in Fairfax (Washington Post)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, RSS and RSS Feed via Feedzilla.

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Maya Uppaluru: A Real Choice for Parents on Their Kids' Health

At a time when 21 million students across the U.S. are receiving free or low-cost school lunches, Congress has voted to block new guidelines that would have limited the use of potatoes and sodium in the National School Lunch Program. These guidelines haven't seen an update in the last 15 years. Among other arguments against the update, conservatives argued that the government should not get involved with telling children what to eat. This is a common but flawed criticism of public health efforts to combat childhood obesity, whether through increased taxes on sugary drinks (the dreaded "soda tax"), providing healthier options in the school lunch line, or encouraging physical activity.

While discussing the First Lady's "Let's Move" campaign, Sarah Palin made the typical conservative argument: "[Mrs. Obama] is telling us that she cannot trust parents to make decisions for their own families and what they should eat, instead of a government taking over and making decisions for us." Yet nothing in the First Lady's program interrupts a parent's right to do what they think is best for their child. Instead, Let's Move would increase support in communities for parents who want their children to eat right and exercise, adding healthier options in schools where parents aren't constantly around to monitor their children.

The Let's Move campaign is a totally voluntary effort to get kids eating healthy and exercising more. In a political climate where this campaign has instantly triggered so much conservative wrath, how can those in the public health community hope to achieve any real change toward improving a serious national health problem?

Over one third of American children are overweight or obese. Children who are obese are up to 80% more likely to stay overweight or obese as adults. Their chances of developing serious health problems, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and cancer are also increased. These health consequences of childhood obesity translate to severe financial consequences as well--the long-term cost of obesity is about $147 billion, or 10% of our national healthcare budget.

We literally can't afford to ignore our obesity problem. What makes the situation more complicated is that many families can't afford the healthy fruits, vegetables and whole grains that science demonstrates are vital to fighting obesity. Even if they can, their children are surrounded by unhealthy options all day at school or child care centers.

The real enemy of a parent's right to choose what their children eat is the scarcity of healthy food options in many American schools and neighborhoods--not government public health interventions. Policies that introduce affordable, healthy food options are better for families and create real freedom of choice.

Students consume between 19-50% of their total calorie intake at school, making these meals one of the most important opportunities in the battle against obesity. This is particularly true for minorities and low-income students, who are disproportionately affected by poor diet and obesity. The 2006 School Health Policies and Practices Study (SHIPPS) conducted by the CDC found that 33% of elementary schools, 71% of middle schools, and 89% of high schools had a vending machine or snack bar where students were mostly purchasing sports drinks, sodas, fruit juices, and higher-fat, salty snacks, but less than half the schools offered plain water in their vending machines. Many more studies have shown that where more snacks and drinks are sold in schools, students consume more total calories, soft drinks, total fat and saturated fat, and lower intakes of fruits, vegetables, and key nutrients.

Given this context, many of our schools are not really providing parents and students with an opportunity to choose healthy food. To combat the poor selection of nutritious food options in schools, Mrs. Obama's Let's Move campaign has encouraged meeting the USDA's more rigorous nutrition guidelines, working with local chefs to teach basic cooking skills to students, and making commitments to reach the science-based nutrition standards outlined by the Institute of Medicine. The program is innovative and emphasizes the fun and creativity in nutrition. Promoting cooking classes provides students with the skills needed to create their own meals that are healthy and built around their own tastes. This type of personal choice is much more meaningful than choosing between brands of potato chips. Encouraging school gardens teaches students to grow their own selection of vegetables and fruit, and imparts the value of natural food. School gardens provide options built around students' personal preferences for certain fruits and vegetables, rather than the selection of questionable produce at the local corner store. Yet conservatives have already responded to this entirely voluntary program with hysterical resistance. Their supposed passion for individual choice reveals the hypocrisy of their criticism, and the problem of obesity is too important and costly to be sidetracked by political pretension. The Let's Move campaign and similar public nutrition initiatives don't take away anyone's individual choice--they expand options for everyone. Empowering students and parents to take their nutrition into their own hands is a solution that should be applauded, not shunned.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maya-uppaluru/post_2713_b_1129828.html

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Attorney: Grand jury delayed in NYC bomb plot case (AP)

NEW YORK ? Prosecutors and a defense lawyer have agreed to delay having a grand jury weigh in on a terrorism case against a man accused of assembling a homemade bomb to try to blow up targets ranging from police cars to post offices, his lawyer said.

Jose Pimentel had been scheduled to learn Monday whether he had been indicted, but defense lawyer Lori Cohen said a legal deadline would be waived for about a month.

"Both parties agree that this is not the case to rush into the grand jury on," she said in an email. The Manhattan district attorney's office declined to comment.

In the meantime, Pimentel will remain behind bars without bail on charges including weapons possession and conspiracy as terror crimes. The Dominican-born al-Qaida sympathizer maintained a website detailing his belief in jihad, or holy war, told an informant he wanted to build small bombs and use them against targets that also included soldiers returning home from abroad, and was arrested in the midst of making a pipe bomb, authorities said. It's unclear whether Pimentel now will have to appear for a court date Monday.

State law limits how long someone charged with a felony can be held without an indictment or hearing, but it's not uncommon for defense lawyers to agree to extend the timeframe ? up to 144 hours ? if they feel that more investigation, a fuller presentation to the grand jury or discussions with prosecutors could benefit their clients.

Cohen said she was continuing to gather information about the case, which is one of few brought under a state terrorism law, instead of federal laws. She already had agreed to extend the deadline last month.

Pimentel's previous lawyer had said the 27-year-old wasn't a true threat, noting that he made his extremist views public, rather than allegedly operating a secret terrorist cell.

But police and prosecutors say Pimentel was clearly dangerous. Pimentel, also known as Muhammad Yusuf, told police he was about an hour from finishing his bomb, work that was secretly recorded on audio and videotape in the informant's apartment, authorities said.

Two law enforcement officials have said the FBI, which is usually involved in terrorism cases, passed on this one because agents felt Pimentel didn't have the inclination or ability to act without the informant's involvement. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the case.

New York Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said the NYPD kept federal authorities in the loop all along before circumstances forced investigators to take swift action using state charges.

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Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/crime/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111204/ap_on_re_us/us_nyc_bomb_plot

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