Environmentalists are blasting an apparent Conservative government climate-change plan that would see greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta's oilsands dramatically increase.

"What it tells us is that the government is keeping secret a plan to allow the oil and gas sector ... particularly the oilsands, to massively increase its emissions under its proposed regulations that it says will start to control greenhouse gases from big industry in Canada," Louise Comeau of the Sage Climate Project told 麻豆影视net on Monday.

"Clearly that is not the case."

John Bennett of Climate Action Network of Canada was even more blunt, telling Newsnet that "it's absolutely an attempt to mislead the public into thinking that the climate change file has been handled, when in reality, it's a way of dodging responsibility ... and not doing anything substantial to reduce emissions."

The internal climate-change plan is dated Dec. 20 and was obtained by The Globe and Mail. Comeau helped the newspaper analyze the plan.

Climate change has been a hot political issue in recent months. Canada, under the Liberals, signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 and ratified it in 2012. The Conservative Party, which has always opposed Kyoto, has essentially abandoned the commitment.

The treaty calls for Canada to cut its emission by six per cent from 1990 levels by 2012. The Conservative government has said because emissions rose under the Liberals, that goal is unattainable.

Kyoto's purpose is to start the world on a path to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous climate change. A Feb. 2 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international body, has found that climate change is occurring and human activity is driving it.

Comeau said under the plan she saw, "at minimum, large industry emissions will go up 50 per cent, and oil sands in particular, emissions will increase about 180 per cent by 2010 and 300 per cent by 2015 and beyond."

Matthew Bramley of The Pembina Institute was one of the environmentalists hired by the Globe to look at the plan. He said the documents appear to show positive figures because they significantly underestimate future oilsands development.

The institute has tracked project announcements by oilsands companies. Bramley said the plan underestimates the future growth of that sector.

The plan outlines an oilsands emission intensity reduction of 40 per cent by 2020.

However, intensity targets are different than hard emission targets and do not necessarily reduce overall emissions.

For example, an oil company that met intensity targets would have to reduce emissions coming from each barrel produced but the company could still produce an unlimited amount of oil -- meaning overall emissions would still go up.

"The government did exactly what the government said it was going to do, which was set what we think are fraudulent targets that they call intensity ...," Bennett said

Intensity is like saying, "there's someone over there beating someone with a baseball bat; we'll give them a hockey stick and it will take them longer to kill them," he said.

Industry in Canada produces about half the emissions. "They should be half the solution," he said.

Government and industry have both given "appallingly low" estimates of what they are willing to do to cut emissions, Comeau said.

Canada needs at least 30-per-cent reductions, not increases, if it hopes to help slow climate change, she said.

Plant not finalized

The draft plan is designed to be different from the 2005 Liberal Kyoto plan killed by the Tories when they took office.

Under the Conservative plan, the rules for industry would take effect in 2010 -- two years later than the Liberals had intended. However, the Tories have set reduction targets for each industrial sector much deeper.

Environment Minister John Baird has promised to announce the regulations by the end of March in an effort to force Canadian industry to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

Mike Van Soelen, director of communications for Baird, told the Globe that no final decisions have been made yet for the plan.

"A lot of work is going into this," he said. "I do note that the documents are dated Dec. 20 and a lot of work has been done [since then]. We have a new minister in place (Baird) and we're working toward final decisions."

The Conservatives came under fire last fall when they revealed that businesses would only be required to meet intensity targets, not overall emission targets, over the next 13 years.

The documents contain charts and targets for each sector and compare the plan to the one proposed by the Liberals.

The government has argued that intensity targets are the best short-term solution until new technology can be used to help with long-term initiatives.

Experts like British economist Nicholas Stern say the longer the world puts off reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the more expensive it will be to fix the problem.

Scientists say that because the impact of such emissions are cumulative, steeper cuts will have to be made in the future if no action is taken today.

If the world heats up more than two degrees Celsius over pre-Industrial Revolution levels, it will be getting into the realm of truly dangerous climate change, they say. The Earth's surface temperature has risen 0.75 C in the past 100 years, and that pace is accelerating, according to the IPCC report.

"It's too urgent. We don't have time to fool around with games. We need real targets that reduce emissions," Bennett said.

With files from The Globe and Mail