2007

Today’s Washington Post story was replete with pompous and absurd proclamations – the pompous being the Danish Environment Minister claiming that she and her ilk “are getting a bit impatient, not on our own behalf but on behalf of the planet.” The condemnations of the US included “unusually blunt language” about how the rest of the world are waiting for the US to act, and that it is the US resistance to adopting a particular approach to addressing emissions that jeopardizes the climate. Not China, India, Mexico and 155 countries representing the vast majority of emissions seeing theirs skyrocket; certainly not the EU.

Although that specific assertion begs the question, no mention was made of actual emissions (sidebar: this story was written by Juliet Eilperin, who has this beat and is by no means new to the story. Putting aside that the administration has only once uttered something that can be called a robust comparison of US and EU performance, it remains baffling that she and her peers can continue writing as if what it is now well understood were never in fact revealed.)

givne that the European Environment Agency may play rhetorical games but it makes no secret of the fact that Europe is not lowering but increasing their emissions, which are up since Kyoto was agreed not down, this struck me as possibly clever groundwork-laying for that which ultimately must publicly come to pass: Europe explaining away the gaping chasm between global warming “world leader!” rhetoric and actual emissions performance. We would’ve cut them but we’re waiting on the US to do something. Don’t laugh, that wouldn’t be all that aberrant for Brussels, Berlin or Paris.

Regardless, yesterday’s vulgar display prompted me to tally the comparative, real emission increases in US and EU, given I have heard the counter “well, in percentage terms, but…” when I point out that EU emissions are increasing faster than the US’s under any modern baseline (that is, since Kyoto was agreed and the EU commenced its breast-beating).

We know that the US CO2 emissions are going up at a much slower rate than the EU-15 ("Europe" per Kyoto). We know that, as a result of the EU-15's obvious failure to reduce emissions, even Cf. 1990 (with the gift that that baseline was to them, for reasons of unrelated UK and DE political decisions), the EU-likes to redefine Europe. They do this to boast on the EU-25 doing this or that — usually, being on target to meet its [sic] Kyoto promise…there not being an EU-25 Kyoto promise, but one collective promise for the EU-15 and 10 different other individual promises, plus 2 countries that are exempt from Kyoto. They do this now as a way to ride the economic collapse of Eastern Europe, reclaiming the hoped-for benefits of the 1990 baseline that slipped away for the more developed EU countries.

However, having a higher percentage increase for even an economy smaller than the US's (EU-15) means that one might actually produce a larger real emission increase as great or greater than the US. One cost of redefining one's self as is convenient is that it allows others to do so, possibly guaranteeing that a larger real emission increase is the case.

It turns out that a quick review indicates that real EU-25 CO2 emissions have increased more than the US since, say, 2000, by a third as much (133.1%) in fact. If my numbers are right, that means +177.7 MMT for the EU-25 in 2005 Cf. 2000, as compared to the US's +133.5 MMT 2005 over 2000, per the Energy Information Administration numbers (I have only just done this and do not know how it holds for older baselines, e.g., 1997 being the only potentially relevant year).

And oh, dear, even without the EU-10, the EU-15, "Old Europe" – a smaller economy than the US's – increased emissions by 161.67 MMT to the US's 133.5 over the same period; that is our climate hectors have increased real emissions more than the US’s, in real terms, by 21%.

So there is no need to rely on the "in percentage terms" qualifier when noting that Europe's emissions have risen faster than the US's (as Kyoto defines Europe). Instead, it appears that Europe's emissions (as Kyoto defines Europe, and certainly as Europe defines Europe, including for these purposes) have not only increased much faster than the US's but also that the EU has increased CO2 emissions much more than the US.

It seems the only thing standing between Europe and a reality check is a White House calling them on their bluster.

Trade—voluntary exchange—is the essence of economic activity. Trade leads to specialization, which increases productivity. As trade expands so does the arena of economic competition, which spurs innovation. Greater trade also means more economic cooperation across distances, which makes societies less vulnerable to local crop failures and other shortages. Thanks to trade, a tiny island nation like Japan, with virtually no natural resources, can be a major economic power.

A long-standing worry of free-market advocates is that global warming will become a pretext for launching a new era of protective tariffs, non-tariff barriers, and trade wars. Former French President Jacques Chirac called the Kyoto Protocol the “first component of an authentic global governance.” Governing without penalties, punishments, or sanctions is a fiction. A Kyoto without teeth is doomed. The treaty asks countries with mandatory emission limits to bear relatively large costs in the short term for relatively small or speculative benefits 80 to 100 years hence. Moreover, any county that cheats on its obligations or does not agree to limit emissions gains a competitive advantage vis-à-vis emission-limited countries in global trade.

Europe, Canada, and Japan are finding it hard to comply with Kyoto’s initial obligation to reduce emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. Just staying within that limit will become progressively more difficult if their populations and economies grow. Yet Canada, the European Union, and Japan are calling for much deeper reductions—emissions cuts of 50 percent below 1990 levels by mid-century. Clearly, Kyoto is unsustainable unless somebody acquires the power to penalize individual countries for non-compliance or for refusing to participate. The most likely enforcement mechanism is trade sanctions—either “carbon tariffs” to offset the cheaper energy costs of non-Kyoto-complying countries or bans on imports from such countries.

Okay, the protectionist logic of Kyoto is clear. But here is where it starts to get weird. President Bush has taken many slings and arrows for opposing U.S. ratification of the Kyoto treaty. Tomorrow, the President hosts a two-day conference of the world’s 16-largest carbon dioxide emitters to discuss climate policy in the post-2012 period. All indications are that President will continue to oppose economy-wide emission caps of the Kyoto variety.

Yet, according to Reuters, C. Boyden Gray, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, endorsed “retaliatory” trade sanctions as a means of pressuring China and India to reduce their emissions. “You could probably find a WTO-compliant way—for example you could require goods to have to pay a fee related to the carbon expended in manufacture," he said.

Doesn’t the Administration know that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander? If carbon tariffs to compel China and India to adopt mandatory emission reductions are legal, then so are carbon tariffs to compel U.S. compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. It gets even stranger, because in the same speech, Mr. Gray argued against the legality of a European Union plan to force all airlines flying into European airspace to abide by new caps on carbon emissions. Allowing U.S. airlines to serve European passengers without complying with the EU caps would allow them to offer cheaper fares than their EU competitors.

The only principled way to oppose the EU carbon cap on U.S. airlines is to oppose all trade discrimination based on the carbon content of goods and services. The world is too energy poor to afford Kyoto—and too poor simply to afford a new era of green protectionism and trade wars.

The Hummer is the bane of the greens’ existence. It is big and loud, so it makes an easy target for those so keen on reducing greenhouse gas emissions that they would, if they had their way, force all Americans to drive Ford Fiestas.

So it should surprise the enviros that the new H3 gets basically the same gas mileage as….a hybrid. That’s right. The H3 gets 20 mpg, just 2 mpg less than the new Lexus Luxury LS Hybrid 08 sedan, whose engineers used hybrid technology not to make the car more fuel efficient, but bigger and louder.

New EU legislation aimed at having green energy account for 20 percent of the Union's overall energy consumption by 2020 is facing a delay, with EU energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs admitting that member states are being "cautious" in contributing too much to the target.

Despite the UN secretary general's upbeat characterization of the summit — which was attended by 150 countries, more than 80 of them at the level of head of state or government — divisions were clear.

The European Union risks a trade fight if it continues with plans to force all airlines flying into European airspace to abide by new carbon dioxide caps, Washington's envoy to the EU said Tuesday.

Retaliatory steps that comply with world trade rules could be found against China and India if they fail to help international efforts to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, a senior US diplomat said on Tuesday.

Yesterday's article on upcoming global warming negotiations ("Bush to host climate-change conference," World) would have been better if it had not relied so heavily on the views of one environmental pressure group. For example, it probably is true that the nations that undertook mandatory commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol are "very unlikely to take on more ambitious targets post-2012 unless the United States comes in with some commitments and unless there's also something more from the major emerging economies," as Elliot Diringer of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change said.

ABC's World News this past Sunday showed the tagline of one of CEI's famous (infamous?) TV ads on global warming, which we first aired in May, 2006.  In the segment, correspondent Bill Bakemore characterizes it this way:  "Public awareness [of global warming] lagged behind, partly because of a disinformation campaign funded by the fossil fuel industry." (See the segment here. And you can see the full ad, "Glaciers,” here)

In fact the fossil fuel industry did not fund any part of the ad campaign.  CEI developed the ad in-house; we produced it and a companion, and bought air time, on a shoestring budget of under $60,000.  We're glad to see that the ads still have "legs", over a year after they were unveiled (Newsweek also displayed them on the web version of its August 13th cover story on "global warming deniers").

As for ABC's claim of disinformation, we challenge anyone to show us a single inaccuracy in those ads.  And if they had an impact on public awareness, that is simply great.