Good Intentions, Creative Accounting and Other EU Eco-Shenanigans

Walter Russell Mead unpacks the Kyoto fraud:

...Over the years, some of the Kyoto fairy dust had begun to wear off. Global greenhouse emissions did not in fact appear to be declining very much. Many of the EU cuts were accounting tricks; counting the closure of inefficient, money-losing industrial dinosaurs in East Germany that were doomed to close anyway towards Germany’s greenhouse targets was a fairly typical example.

But a couple of recent studies now seem to show that Kyoto was as big a fraud as the most militant enviro-skeptics ever suspected. And it looks as if the 95 American senators were 100 percent right: the much heralded Protocol was a singularly stupid piece of counterproductive social engineering that encouraged the migration of good jobs to China and other low wage countries — without helping the environment at all.

The left leaning Guardian newspaper in Britain let the cat out of the bag yesterday, reporting that while the EU’s emission of CO2 declined by 17% between 1990 and 2010, this apparent progress was bogus. If you add up the CO2 released by the goods and services Europeans consumed, as opposed to the CO2 thrown off by the goods and services they produced, the EU was responsible for 40% more CO2 in 2010 than in 1990. The EU, as the Guardian puts it, has been outsourcing pollution — and jobs — rather than cutting back on greenhouse gasses.

EU “progress” on greenhouse gasses in the last twenty years was a mirage. And the only reason that the EU can pretend to look green is that it was outsourcing economic growth to countries like China. Those 95 US senators [who voted against Kyoto when it came to a Senate vote] were totally right; twenty years of the Kyoto Protocol have brought the world twenty years of rising greenhouse gas emissions and twenty years of job migration to low wage, low regulation havens in the Third World...

But, hey, as long as everyone feels really good about how hard they're working to "save" the planet--that's all that really counts, right?