A day late and a € short

Fraser Nelson, political editor of the UK based journal “The Business” writes in the current edition about the United States approach of CO2 somehow yielding better results than the economies with the most similarity to it who were signatories to the Kyoto Accord.

His conclusion? US beats Europe over CO2 control

The United States has frozen its carbon dioxide emissions at a time when signatories of the Kyoto Protocol are conceding that they cannot meet their own targets, according to official figures released last week.

While the American economy grew by 3.5% last year, more than twice the European average, its fossil fuel emissions were up by only 0.1% – with no growth in road pollution and a drop in aircraft emissions.

[...]

Since 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was first signed, the US has now made more progress in reducing its per capita fossil fuel emissions than the UK, France, Spain, Finland, Sweden and Japan – even before its economic growth is considered.

The extent to which they yell and scream about the United States as a failure, a “wild west” where business always gets its’ way is laughable and a sort of point of their pride when followed by the recitations about what they are doing theoretically for the environement. Like most of it, it’s a long rapsheet of treaties that have been signed and ignored, and an endless, constantly growing alphabet soup of organizations, talking shops, and fig-leaf operations.

Quite simply, engineering can’t be executed in words if deeds are ill founded and based on PR, or done to get the public to get into the habit of never questioning a new regulation or measure. Moreover, without development and advancement, the entire exercise is worthless. The means of doing that is to be scientifically and industrially dynamic, not binding the people behind it to be limited by the forcing them to parrot the politically correct saws and pay homage to notions and precepts.

The way to accomplish it is to first establish what the real problems are, and then give them goals and issues to chip away at – not force on them a political purity test to see if they deserve to be Borked with the Lomborg treatment.

Although President George Bush pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, after a bipartisan vote in Congress, America has made substantially more progress than its European counterparts, which are still signed up to reach its targets.

[...]

David Miliband, UK Environment Secretary, acknowledged last week that the government is “off track” in meeting its own target of reducing emissions by 20% under the 1990 baseline set by Kyoto. It has met the 10% target.

Spanish carbon emissions were 48% above the 1990 base in 2004, more then treble the 15% limit of its Kyoto target. Portugal, Greece and Ireland – also Kyoto signatories – all have emissions at least 20% higher

Of the 30 industrialised countries which signed Kyoto, 17 were exceeding their targets at the time the last count was taken, in 2004. Japan pledged itself to a 6% drop in its 1990 emissions levels, yet has so far experienced a 7% rise.

The notion sold by the environmental movement about how business can “coexist” with their goals has in every case proven to be a sales gimmick. Give industries goals without acutely micromanaging them or the message and they can come through for you. The very idea of imposing control over private businesses, long a predilection with the western left’s socialist sensibility defies every theories applied to learning, invention, or even the arts.
Nonetheless they will cheerfully forment suspicion, and apply the same controls to people whose work they little understand or fear for the “symbolic nature” that they hold for them, such as the energy business, manufacturing, agricultural science, water treatment, etc... in short, any sector producing economically and personally critical commodities which they think no-one will need if they just “imagine another world”.

The fuse is lit!