David Freddoso has a piece up on NRO today examining Al Gore’s cheerleading for the EU’s Kyoto experiment. Gore’s claims consists, like his movie, of half-truths, non-truths, and some flat-out falsehoods. Here are a few points to remember when reading this piece:

Although the EU, like Gore, is now trying to be clever by redefining “Europe” for Kyoto purposes in popular discussion, there has been no such redefinition. They both do this because, by bringing in nations whose economies collapsed after the ultra-artificial 1990 baseline year for this 1997 treaty, it absorbs a lot of economic collapse, er, “emissions reductions”. Regardless, “Europe” for Kyoto purposes remains the EU-15; to claim otherwise is to transparently seek to claim (inapplicable) virtue in economic malaise.

Europe collectivized their emission obligations under Kyoto’s Article 4 so as to have a “bubble”, under which they shifted around the original burden of an -8% promise that they all originally ratified, individually. This allows 13 countries ostensibly to ride the UK’s early-’90s “dash to gas”, and Germany’s absorption (and shuttering) of East German capacity. The latter act alone accounts for 75% of “Europe’s” emission reductions under the collectivized deal. The EU-15 is actually now the Party to the treaty, not Germany, the UK, et al. It is therefore not subject to rhetorical games.

Europe also did not in fact recently adopt “binding” promises, as Gore says, any more than Kyoto is a “binding” treaty – it is not but instead, like this promise, only offers the promise of being made binding, which its Parties rejected. All Europe did was trumpet a promise that the EU-25 would collectively reduce emissions (or more likely, as they are currently doing, buy credits from countries like China) by 20% by 2020. This is rhetoric; it cannot be enforced. This is good for them because, also contrary to Gore’s claims they are not reducing their emissions, it would be either utterly unrealistic or breathtakingly expensive. Already, EU leaders are pointing out that “no country will be forced to adopt measures in this field without its consent” (Polish President Kaczynski) and that the beauty in this promise as it stands is that each country gets to believe that it is a special case (German Chancellor Merkel). Make promises today, worry about them tomorrow; this perfectly sums up Europe’s Kyoto dalliance.

Again, by (actually) redefining “Europe” for this “post-2012” purpose the EU lessens the burden on the rest, the new EU-10 all being 1990s economic basket cases. However, as I will demonstrate in a forthcoming paper, by luring Eastern Europe with the promise that they face no actual reduction requirement, a business-as-usual approach in the face of official projections by almost all these countries of emission increases provides little to no succor as originally intended.

This promise was of a collective -20% target, again Cf. 1990. Brussels does not actually have the power, or in EU parlance the “competence”, to assign each country a quota; that must be volunteered, or agreed to. This reality is increasingly cited as a reason that the EU “constitution” must be imposed and Brussels otherwise further empowered. Absent this, agreeing on such a new “Burden Sharing Agreement” will prove, IMHO, the undoing of Europe’s Kyoto experiment. Getting someone to actually be the one to pick up the tab — Germany for example has said it’s now someone else’s turn despite that their first “cut” was to ride E. Germany’s collapse — is such a daunting prospect that Eurocrats are complaining that the BSA concept should be scrapped.

This would matter not. Each nation would still, in practice under nearly any scenario, require national targets particularly given their differing circumstances. And even the most “yes-sir-how-high-sir” country when it comes to Brussels (say, Spain) would reject the pain that this de facto non-binding promise of -20% Cf. 1990 would entail. Regardless, experience indicates that, just as with Mr. Gore, one ought to take any EU claims with caution.