Despite Europe’s bluster about historic achievements reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions, upon scrutiny the chest-thumping and self-congratulation fall apart when reading European Environment Agency reports, which reveals how the man behind the curtain runs the show in the Emerald City. Europe’s historic acheivements amount to nothing more than a) shutting down East Germany after reunification, replacing its aging and dirty Soviet-era capacity with newer West Germany production, thereby presenting what would then be called “Germany” with a large “reduction”; and b) the UK’s one-off dash to gas, which gas is now trickling to a stop, causing the coal pits to reopen.
These steps unrelated to Kyoto — if nonetheless explaining Kyoto’s otherwise bizarre 1990 baseline year — account for Europe’s “Kyoto ‘reductions.’”
No success stories, after all. Oh, well, there was one exception where some small reductions were claimed without egregious accounting tricks. That is, Sweden has avoided increasing its emissions (its revised Kyoto promise was to not increase them beyond a certain point, so don’t get too excited), through a heavy reliance on nuclear power, Danish “waste” wind, and a touted emphasis on biomass — which, it turns out, includes this grisly program.
So, Europe’s only success story, relative though it may be, also presents the greens with a bit of a conundrum: Do we smash atoms and burn little bunny rabbits? Surely we ought to expect the BBC ad campaign for children on this any day, right?