While sitting in DMV hell — prepping myself for a physician’s waiting room under Obamacare, of course — I received this bit of desperate spin from Climate Progress.

Team Soros is taking the plunge and — I’m guessing because they feel they have no choice but to swing for the fences — are claiming that Europe’s cap-and-trade scheme worked. Now, others have tried this before, but those folks avoided the question of ETS impact on actual emissions — because these went up under the ETS.

Team Soros says they were reduced. When they went up. Read on.

Official data are never released by the EEA until 18 months after each reporting period ends. All indications are that emissions in Europe dropped during 2008, like emissions around the world — due to the worldwide recession.

Here’s how we know that Climate Progress’s purported assessment is bunk: ETS was sold in lieu of the less gamable and inefficient, but more politically dangerous, direct tax — just as Waxman-Markey is being sold here — on the pretense that such a scheme provides a “certainty of emissions,” as opposed to the “certainty of cost” a tax provides. But as I alluded to yesterday, that’s proved to be a crock. The claimed certainty was a prescribed emissions reduction, and in real terms, not tail-covering comparisons with a conjured and wildy varying range of “where emissions might have been” — which amounts to sad, post-facto, hypothetical nonsense.

That wasn’t the initial standard. And incidentally, claiming in mid-2009 that Europe has somehow “met” its Kyoto obligation of a particular average over 2008-2012 is ridiculous, guys. The ETS’s standard was reductions, and it finished Phase 1 in December. Reductions didn’t happen. Despite Team Soros’ rather wild claim of a reduction of 2.5 to 5 percent, all those emissions reductions are hypothetical “emissions avoided.” (But what’s a hundred-degree margin of error when rampantly speculating amongst friends?)

For the three years for which we have official data, 2005 to 2007, ETS-covered emissions went up, each and every year, not down. (See the EEA’s January 2009 report for the data.)

What’s worse, and what makes this spoof a pathetic fabrication, is that this emissions-reduction failure happened while economy-wide GHG emissions dipped, due to mild winters (which ended, with a vengeance) and an economic slowdown (which accelerated with equal fury, accounting for the, ahem, worldwide reduction in emissions) — even the EEA admits as much.

I guess Climate Progress’s spin is another way of claiming that the ETS is responsible for the worldwide GHG reduction. As Cap Weinberger said of détente: if this is progress, you can’t afford much more progress. But its so cute the way you try to deal with it.

Maybe they’ll try a little harder. My guess is I’ll still be waiting here at the DMV. But ETS will still have failed. It’s designed to.