A Place to Stand

The climate policy of the European Union is now stuck in a dead end. Europe wanted to be the leader – showing the world the way. ....climate summits in Copenhagen and in Cancun were supposed to herald a successor treaty for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
But both summits yielded zero results. Today it is clear that there is going to be no successor agreement....

The emerging economies of Asia, especially, are refusing to allow their possibilities for growth to be curbed by obligatory CO2 reductions. Everywhere across the world, climate laws are being buried for good or put on ice.

Treating the EU promotion of global warming alarmism as a way of asserting Europe as the potential global leader and a good way to be rude to the Americans while weighting the Kyoto rules against them has been a failure. And then some. Arguably the greatest failure since the Battle of Adrianople. OK overstatement but I only said "arguably".

The EU used to be the world's largest economic unit with the USA as only competitor and it still is. .But only just and only because American growth has been very poor too and because when warming alarmism started there were no other real competitors. Over the last decade and a half the world economy has grown at 5% annually, China's at 10% and India's, Russia's etc at about 7-9%. That means, by the rule of 70 the world's GNP has double over a decade and a half, China's has quadrupled; the other faster growing countries have tripled  The EU has barely grown if we include the current recession.We tried to lead the world into a dead end and the world has refused to follow.

   This has political consequences. Nobody is going to be persuaded to follow an EU lead for at least a generation. We no longer have the economic clout to pressure anybody. The dominant body is no longer the G7 but the G20, and even more humiliatingly the G20 is not actually made up of the largest 20 economies as the name implies because several countries, which are members of the EU should be included. Presumably it would be even more humiliating to remove them in a few years.

   Which is why China is now in a position to act against the EU's last feeble effort - carbon taxing other countries airlines. Initially by deciding not to buy from Airbus. Whether they buy or not all that this scheme would do would be for Europe to isolate the rest of the world from it (or rather vice versa).

  Whose fault is it that the EU has done this charge of the Light Brigade style folly (another military disaster metaphor but they are apt)? The fault of our Luddite and incompetent political leaders alone, that is whose. Now can we please get rid of these Luddite parasites. I don't even insist on it being fatal.

  An in a neat twist of irony the latest warming alarmist claim is that the reason claimed for the last decades failure to warm catastrophically, ot at all, is blamed on China's industrialisation putting more particulates in the air. Yes the alarmists are saying that China's failure to cut CO2, indeed increasing it markedly, is to blame for the failure of their scare story.