The Toronto Star's Peter Calamai looks at the federal government's disarray with respects to its Kyoto strategy:

An excerpt:

Critics who complain that Canada doesn't have a national plan to meet its Kyoto greenhouse gas commitments have recently been proven spectacularly wrong.

The federal government actually has four Kyoto plans, all ostensibly intended to reduce national emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases to 6 per cent below 1990 levels during the five years between 2008 and 2012.

That translates into at least 280 million fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide spewed into the air annually than if industry, agriculture, transportation and individuals kept producing as usual. To put the necessary reduction in perspective, it amounts to a 40 per cent drop from what Canadians collectively generated in 2002, the most recent emission figures made public by the government.

None of the plans yet shows much promise of achieving anything like that sort of reduction without using some other country's emission credits.

The government's original 2002 Kyoto plan aimed lower, at a reduction of 240 million tonnes. But that plan spelled out reductions for only three-quarters of that target and federal officials conceded under questioning at the time that the final result wouldn't do more than match 1990 emission levels, rather than a 6 per cent reduction.

Officially, this 2002 plan is still in effect, although no one here takes that seriously.

Then, there are two new proposed plans from the feuding environment and natural resources departments, both leaked to the media over the past two weeks in selected tidbits.

Finally, there's a fourth scheme currently being cobbled together in the Prime Minister's Office. Paul Martin obliquely alluded to one possible element in that plan this week in Japan, noting that Kyoto lets countries carry over unmet obligations into a second period to start around 2017.

But neither Martin nor his official, who later offered "clarification," mentioned that a reduction target missed the first time must be increased by 30 per cent the next time around.

Whatever policy elements managed to survive this government version of a World Wrestling Federation SmackDown! are supposed to be unveiled here Feb. 16 when the Kyoto Protocol officially goes into effect for Canada and the 135 other ratifying countries.

"It's not exactly a smooth-running ship," says David Runnalls, an environmental policy guru who has advised the federal government on climate change.