Let the Bali Eurospin Begin

EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas gave a press conference to claim victory where there is none, which message was picked up by the home-grown press and doubtless to be recycled at the upcoming talks in Bali, and reminding us more than any other issue “climate change” statements out of Europe require parsing.

To wit, pulled from the EUObserver (ellipses in original):

“‘Our emissions are currently 2 percent below [1990] levels (…) while our economy has grown by more than 35 percent over the same period.”

The commissioner also said that ‘it is almost certain’ that Europe will meet its goal of cutting its carbon dioxide emissions by 8 percent by 2012 – a target agreed and shared under the Kyoto protocol by 15 EU member states in the late 1990s.”

Reader, beware.  Europe has quietly swapped out one “we” for another, such that the “we” Dimas refers to now is the EU-27, a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.  This does not reflect the performance of “Europe” according to Kyoto, which is the EU-15, or “Old Europe”.*  The remaining States only afford such rhetoric by bringing to the table an emissions inventory well below their 1990 baseline, due to economic collapse, an artifact of political history unrelated to the Kyoto agenda.

This is not pedantic picking of nits, but revelation of a rhetorical ploy meant to assist political pressure against, well, us.  Instead, it is significant because Europe as Kyoto recognizes it cannot ride the post-1990 economic collapse to a claim of “emission reductions, while growing the economy!”  Even in the EU-27, emissions are actually well above where they were when the economic growth to which he refers began, in the late 1990s.

It is also a breathtaking statement to claim not that Europe will meet its Kyoto promise – which allows for the purchase of offsets for their emissions overage – but to assert that it will cut emissions by the promised amount.  In truth, the most optimistic (that is, Brussels’) projection of EU performance has them leveling emissions off at 1990 levels, which means they would buy the entirety of their “reduction”.  Others aren’t quite so rosy.  Still, that’s fine if that’s the game we agree to play.  But drop the breast-beating about having “reduced emissions” by 8% through the courageous act of paying the Chinese to ramp down their HFC production.

*For Kyotophiles, recall that in fact, as a technical matter, there are only 11 EU Parties to Kyoto.  There is the EU-10 (Romania, the Baltics, Bulgaria…), and the EU-15 who resubmitted their promise as a single Party under Kyoto’s Article 4.  In short, by changing the metric Dimas is changing the subject: Europe is not reducing emissions.  See here and here, recalling that there are 2 more years recorded, 2005 and, at the Member State level, 2006, a 0.8% reduction and an appx. 1.4% increase, respectively; so things are actually worse than the chart in the former link shows).