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October 17, 2008

EU has second thoughts about emissions targets

Ed Lasky
Recall all the braying from Europe regarding America's failure to ratify the Kyoto Accord? Bill Clinton signed it but refused to send the treaty for ratification to the Senate, knowing that it would be rejected by both Democrats and Republicans.

Clinton and his Vice-President Al Gore - and innumerable Democrats - have castigated George Bush for refusing to sign and submit the Accord. Bill Clinton has assured people that the Kyoto Accord would not hurt economies.  Much political hay has been made here in America and much ridicule has been directed at America from Europe.
The Europeans even went beyond the Accord to agree to cut emissions further. Now they are changing their minds.
Time for a reevaluation.
The European Union has routinely exceeded the caps put on emissions that are part of the Kyoto Accord. Now they have formally asked for a revision of last year's agreement. They want to allow more emissions, recognizing that the agreement signed last year-to much self-acclaim- has harmed their economies and threatened to do further harm in the years ahead.
 
At a rancorous summit meeting this week of the European Union’s heads of state, several Eastern European countries and Italy said they might no longer be able to afford to slash greenhouse gas emissions as envisioned under a broad plan agreed upon last year and would need some concessions from other countries in the bloc. That agreement called for the union to reduce such emissions, linked by climate scientists to global warming, by 20 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020.

The plan — hailed by the former French president Jacques Chirac as “a great moment in European history” — goes beyond the Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrial nations bound by the treaty to reduce the emission of global-warming gases by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Reality strikes every once in a while in Europe.

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