Day By Day

Saturday, June 18, 2005

Europe's Environmental Hypocrisy

The Guardian reports:

Europe is failing to tackle climate change, putting further pressure on Tony Blair to come up with a fresh initiative at the G8 summit and embarrassing the European commission, which is floundering over budget cuts and the constitution treaty.

The latest figures for Europe's greenhouse gas emissions, seen by the Guardian but not due to be released until next week, show that the 15 countries who were EU members in 2003 increased their overall emissions by 1.1% in the year up to 2004.

Under the Kyoto agreement, which came into force earlier this year, EU countries must reduce emissions by 8% by 2012 - something which looks increasingly unlikely.

Figures from the European Environment Agency show that only France, Germany, Sweden and the UK have any hope of cutting their energy use in time to meet their targets and that most countries are now falling well behind.

They also show that Britain increased its total emissions more than all other EU countries except Italy and Finland in 2003/4. The 1.3% increase, equivalent to 7.4m tonnes of carbon, was mainly because people drove more.

Britain is expected to only just fulfil its Kyoto obligations but not the government's more ambitious target of a 20% cut in emissions by 2010.

In the EU only Ireland and Portugal have cut their emissions. But both are expected to exceed their future targets following years of economic expansion. Finland, Denmark and Austria burned more fossil fuels than in previous years.

So after years of denouncing America for not jumping over the Kyoto cliff, Europe turns out to not take its prescriptions all that seriously. I sorta suspected that all along.

Read it here.

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