The EU’s climate goal is the world’s most ambitious, but how much of it is based on false accounting?
The EU has earned a lot of credit on the international climate scene. It has pushed through a roadmap to a second Kyoto deal at the Durban climate change summit, and stood firm on tugging global airlines into a carbon-pricing scheme.
More than anything it has demonstrated its good faith with a pioneering set of decarbonisation targets at home: the “20-20-20″ goals. By 2020, the EU has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 20% of their 1990 level, and to increase the share of renewables to 20% of the energy mix. It also has a voluntary target to increase energy efficiency by 20% on 2005 levels, and an obligation to source 10% of its transport fuels from renewable energy sources by the same year.
“We’re not waiting for talks to end in binding targets,” the climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, said in Brussels, shortly before the Durban summit. “We’re trying to move forward with our low-carbon roadmap, energy efficiency, discussing how we can increase efforts back home.”
She had reason to sound confident. The EU’s climate and environment directorates are staffed with some of the most talented and dedicated friends of the earth that you could find. But what if a culture of creative accounting, for reasons of political expediency, was robbing the targets they were working for of any credibility?
Warning: politically incorrect speculation coming up! As Europe becomes increasingly Muslim, CO2 emissions will drop, because they primarily live in poverty and don’t have the will, education, or expertise to develop, much less maintain, large-scale power generation technology. For them to return to the science and technology status that they much earlier enjoyed would take a cultural reversal that would be impossible to achieve. As a result,
Europe will meet its emissions targets.
What’s with all the creative bookkeeping on the warmist/Gaia-ist side? Apparently this entire Klimate Kabuki is created of whole cloth. When, oh when, does the public wake up and toss these fakers and charlatans?
Duh. Now let me count the Carbon…. one, two…
Oops, missed that bit of air. Quick, sequester it!
Phew, add that to the money pile.