Joe Romm over at Climate Progress has a good post about the framework for a bipartison climate and clean energy bill that was discussed today by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT). They’re aiming to bring it to the Senate floor early next year and pass it into law during the current session of Congress. The bill commits to a 17 per cent reduction of CO2-equivalent emissions compared to a baseline year of 2005 by 2020. That’s about 3.4 per cent below 1990 levels, which is slightly better than the Canadian government’s weak commitment of around 3 per cent and far below the European Union’s 20 per cent reduction target (which some, such as U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, say should be raised to 30 per cent). The chatter out there is that this U.S. bill, as watered down as it is, is still the best President Obama can hope for. At least it will get the ball moving on a continental cap-and-trade system. Like Canada, there’s lots of support in the U.S. bill for nuclear and “clean coal,” which is a shame considering it means resources that could be directed at energy efficiency and renewables will be absorbed by the established players. Of interest is the following statement: “We will make it easier to finance the construction of new nuclear power plants and improve the efficiency of the licensing process for traditional as well as small modular reactors.” This to me (and I may be wrong) is the first time I’ve seen a clear recognition of a boost to small modular reactors, which I wrote about recently. I think this is good, because the private sector can more easily finance smaller reactors on their own, meaning less vacuuming away of public funds from green energy.

It’s good to see some movement on a U.S. climate bill, but it’s still far, far short of what’s really needed. One can only hope that as the big U.S. ship moves to meet even these weak targets, perhaps the momentum will be so great that businesses, industry and consumers find it all the more easier to embrace clean energy and move beyond the targets. Wishful thinking, I know, but you’ll never turn the ship if you don’t turn the steering wheel.

Okay, so 64 per cent of Canadian respondents to a new survey believe that industrialized nations should have more ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions than developing countries. Most want to see a binding agreement result from Copenhagen, and 81 per cent said Canada needs to make its own commitments independent of what the United States decides to do. Another poll conducted last week found that two-thirds of Canadians see climate change as the planet’s defining crisis.

The position of most Canadians couldn’t be farther apart than the position of their federal government. Britain’s Prime Minister, meanwhile, is intent on raising the bar on action.

Canadians woke up this morning with the news that Greepeace activists had scaled the walls of a Parliament Hills building and displayed a banner reading “Harper/Ignatieff: Climate inaction costs lives.” For my non-Canadian readers, they are referring to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal opposition leader Michael Ignatieff.

It was a fitting way for Canada to kickstart the long-anticipated Copenhagen climate conference, which began this morning and will go on until Dec. 18, when U.S. president Barack Obama is expected to attend. Obama’s attendance at the end is actually a good sign because it signals that Obama could end up closing the conference with the kind of strong commitment to greenhouse-gas reductions that the world is expecting. On the first day of the conference officials from other countries were clear about what the focus would be over the next 11 days: the U.S. and China. China announced last month that Premier Wen Jiabao would also be attending, while India’s leader Manmohan Singh has also committed to attend. Both India and China have raised hopes after both countries committed to reducing the carbon intensity of their economies (not absolute reduction, mind you, but at least it’s a start).

A consensus is emerging that a $10-billion a year fund should be set up, by 2012, that would help developing countries with their adaption and mitigation efforts. But China and India (backed by Brazil and South Africa) have made clear that they’ll walk out of the conference if developed nations try to force their agenda on developing nations. Still, the fact that all of these countries are at the table and have agreed on the need to reduce emissions is an encouraging sign. “Never in 17 years of climate negotiations have so many different nations made so many firm pledges together,” U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer said in a statement yesterday evening. The key word all countries are clinging to is “momentum.” The New York Times has a great analysis of what to expect here.

What’s also interesting is that Canada has attracted a lot of international attention, but not for its commitments. As these two editorials — one from the Toronto Star, one from the Globe and Mail — show, the country enters this conference MIA, both with an action plan and a meaningful emissions-reduction target. This morning, Canada’s top negotiator at the conference repeated the government’s stubborn position: “Canada is not going to be changing the number that it is promoting at this meeting.”

The video here is of John Holdren, science and technology advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama. He’s also director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. His message, summarized in the statement below as part of testimony yesterday to a Congressional committee, is both powerful and disturbing: “In my judgement, and that of the great majority of other scientists who have seriously studied this matter, the current state of knowledge about it, even though incomplete, as science always is, and even though controversial in some details, as science almost always is, is sufficient to make clear that failure to act promptly to reduce global emissions to the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping substances is overwhelmingly likely to lead to changes in climate too extreme and too damaging to be adequately addressed by any adaptation measures that can be foreseen.” I urge you to watch the full video, which is about 6.5 minutes long.

UPDATE: If you watch the video, Holdren starts off by discussing the hacked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Like most credible climate authorities, he says the e-mails have been scrutinized and spun out of context and in no way show there’s any kind of conspiracy or exaggeration of global warming. Rather, they show a bunch of frustrated scientists under siege by the persistent pecking of climate skeptics. I want to add here links to a Nature magazine editorial and an article in The Economist, both of which come to similar conclusions. Sorry Rex. I’m not saying these scientists who wrote the e-mails weren’t careless…  I’m just saying it doesn’t appear to go beyond that, at least from any fair reading of the messages.

Last week it was seven activists who staged a sit-in protest in the Calgary office of federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice, and today another seven are occupying the office of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty in Whitby, Ontario. There are two ways to think about this. One, likely the government’s thinking, is that these protests will soon go away. The other, and what I believe, is that these protests are just the beginning. Fact is a growing number of Canadians are concerned about climate change and the inaction of their federal government, which continues to stick to “intensity targets” when it talks about an emissions-reduction plan. As we head next week into the Copenhagen talks, Prime Minister Harper is going to face some scathing criticism from nations that see Canada as an embarrassing laggard on the international scene.