At a recent summit, the EU tried once again to finally reach an agreement on individual-country quotas that will permit the group of nations to arrive at their promised post-2012 GHG-emissions reductions — 20 percent below 1990 levels. This was the most recent in a series of EU meetings seeking agreement on individual-member-state quotas — the last took place in December 2007 — each of which have ended in stalemate.

See, this is where this “world leadership” — in making such group-wide promises, at least — gets difficult. Recall German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s revealing, possibly too-clever, admission to Der Spiegel on March 9, 2007:

Addressing the need for a post-2012 “Burden Sharing Agreement” that assigns real cuts to countries previously given a free-ride, German Chancellor Angela Merkel “admitted that tough negotiations are still ahead. The compromise would be a tough task. The beauty is, Merkel said smiling, that each member state thinks they’re a special case. ‘That makes us all equal.’ “ [emphasis added]

Apparently all of those special cases are holding out in the hope that someone else takes the hit.

Recall that every EU-15 nation promised to reduce emissions by 8 percent (on average) below 1990 levels over 2008-12 — but that target was abandoned (as permitted under Kyoto’s Article 4) in favor of collectivizing their emissions. (It is Europe, remember). This allowed Spain, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and others to swap their promise of a reduction into an often-steep increase; France to trade hers for no reduction at all; Italy for a slightly smaller reduction; and so on.

The EU was able to trade out of their promised individual reductions for a collective reduction because of two political decisions that preceded Kyoto: the UK’s “dash for gas” — replacing coal with North Sea gas as the major source of electricity production; and reunified Germany’s decision to shut down East German Soviet-era industrial energy production, and replace it with cleaner West German capacity.

Those two “one offs” having been exercised, European countries are now stuck with the requirement to meet their promises of emission reductions with — gasp! — actual reductions. (That, or by allowing even more massive wealth transfers to exempt countries like China — under the HFC scam, for example).

Faced with such tough choices, Europe has kicked the can down the road. In classic form, they are trumpeting their historic agreement . . . to work out an agreement later — this time by December 2008. We’ll be waiting.