Canada unlikely to match US emissions cuts

Canada is not likely to match the United States’s latest pledged greenhouse gas emissions cuts, as it has done for two decades.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Thursday that Canada will release an emissions pledge next month in advance of the United Nations’s big climate pact meeting in December, The Canadian Press reported.

{mosads}But it probably won’t match the 26 percent to 28 percent cut by 2025 that the United States pledged in March.

“It’s unlikely our targets will be exactly the same as the United States, but they will be targets of similar levels of ambition to other major industrialized countries,” Harper said, according to the Press.

Canada matched U.S.targets under the 1997 Kyoto accord and the 2009 Copenhagen accord.

Harper did not say which countries’ targets will be close to Canada’s this time around. He said the pledge will have “additional regulatory measures,” and will not mandate a tax on carbon dioxide emissions.

Thomas Mulcair, leader of Canada’s opposition New Democratic Party, said Harper’s government is failing to take action on climate.

“Harper does not believe that climate change is real. He does not believe therefore in the necessity to reduce greenhouse gases,” Mulcair told The Canadian Press.