What a year this has already been. First, our energy-policy role model Brazil announced it was vastly ramping up its investments to spend a fortune on offshore oil and gas development. Suddenly, we were reminded that even the greens can be accidentally right, when reality catches up to their rhetoric.

Then earlier this week, we read that the U.K. can no longer claim to be one of the only two EU-15 countries that have reduced emissions consistent with a Kyoto promise–their actual performance turns out to be about -8 percent below 1990, and not the promised -12.5 percent. And even that is thanks, not to any Kyoto-style policies, but to the one-off, pre-Kyoto political decision to dash to gas. (The North Sea reserves of which are all but depleted, leading to a dash . . . back to coal!)

And now, as Ed notes below, it turns out that our moral, intellectual, and environmental superiors, the Swedes, really aren’t going to get off the nuclear stuff, after all. They’ve once again renewed their promise to phase out their critical fleet (critical to them as well as to the equally active posturers, the Danes, to whom Sweden ships the atom-smashed juice, by the way) at some other, later-than-promised time in the future. Their argument this time is “climate concerns,” which again means they’ve looked all over and discovered there actually is no pixie dust energy source to meet their public’s needs.

Soon, they and others might even realize that it’s actually the electricity itself that the enviro-agitators cannot abide–and not the electricity sources they agitate against, one by one–because of all the things that reliable electricity provides: technological muscle, leading to economic growth, yielding widespread wealth creation and improved standards of living. Our Malthusian green elite are terrified by the thought of more and more people enjoying suburban living in larger homes they drive to in bigger cars–they fear letting others have what they themselves enjoy.

So what was, as of yesterday, our sole remaining environmental role model will continue to be fired 50 percent by nuclear power. Oh and by the way, Sweden’s promised Kyoto “reduction” that they had projected coming barely under? That would be an increase, of no greater than +4 percent above 1990. Take away the phony-baloney 1990 baseline they suckered Al Gore into, and we begin to see clearly that our environmental role models were never all that they were cracked up to be.