Currently in Denmark’s capital city of Copenhagen, the leaders of the world are uniting in an effort to eradicate the causes of anthropomorphic climate change. The forum is said to be the largest climate summit in the world’s history, with 119 world leaders in attendance at one point or another. Prime Minister Stephen Harper was late to announce his intention to attend the summit. In fact it was only after U.S. President Barack Obama announced his own intentions that the Canadian Prime Minister followed suit.

This pattern of following the U.S. path on climate change is the key ingredient to the Government of Canada’s current environmental strategy. It was in the early autumn of this year that Canadian Minister of the Environment, Jim Prentice, confirmed his commitment that Canada would work towards a Bilateral Climate Change Cooperation agreement with the United States. Earlier this month, Mr. Prentice announced that Canada would come to the Copenhagen Summit with a pledge matching Obama’s provisional commitment of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050.

Yet new caveats are emerging in the climate change commitments outlined in both the United States and Canada. In the United States, it is expected that the politically powerful coal industry will receive relief from Washington, leading the tar sands in Alberta to hope for the same level of amnesty. The Globe and Mail has reported that, while Prentice urges that no decision has yet been made on the issue, he has argued that “energy intensive, export-oriented industries may need protection under a federal climate change plan”.

Such a carve out will most certainly be controversial as the tar sands remain a hot topic within both external and domestic debates on climate change. Activists within the United States have been very vocal on the emissions created by the tar sands, and while President Obama has been diplomatic in his approach towards Alberta’s energy intensive industry, he has singled it out as Canada’s greatest ecological challenge.

Meanwhile in Canada, the provinces have grown more at odds with each other, specifically those which have already planned strict cap-and-trade systems or carbon tax structures (Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia), versus the heavy emitters (Alberta and Saskatchewan).

Related:

• In the Classroom: Transboundary Environmental Governance in Canada and the United States
• CIGI Working Paper: Reafirming Global Environmental Governance
• CFR Related Material: The Debate over Greenhouse Gas Cap-and-Trade
• Past Event: Changing Climates in North American Politics

(Image Credit: Flickr user Rainforest Action Network)