According to EurActiv: Despite “significant steps” taken to soften the impact of the European Union’s climate change goals on its industry, Italy yesterday (8 December) continued to maintain a tough negotiating line ahead of a decisive European Union (EU) summit on 11-12 December.
During separate meetings of foreign affairs and energy ministers in Brussels, the Italian government firmly restated its intention to obtain exemptions from the package for its energy-intensive industrial sectors such as paper, glass, steel and brick industries…
Under the draft package to be discussed by EU heads of state and government this week, energy-intensive industries will be asked, as of 2013, to gradually pay for the right to emit CO2.
But Italy, Germany and other Eastern European countries claim the rules, if applied too strictly, will force energy-intensive sectors to close down factories and move abroad, leading to job losses and rising CO2 emissions outside Europe (‘carbon leakage’)…
The European Parliament will now be asekd to give its green light to the deal in a vote scheduled on 17 December.
According to Benny Peiser: I expect that the EU summit at the weekend will come up with a very similar fudge – as usual. I also expect that the green media and climate activists are likely to hail it as a ‘historic’ breakthrough – as usual. But let’s not beat around the bush: whatever the EU summit may or may not decide at the weekend, you can be absolutely sure that it will not be legally binding targets. This original plan has now been abandoned – full stop. Without binding targets, however, the EU will signal unambiguously that it is waiting for the rest of the world to move – before it will make *any* binding commitments. And that, we know, could take for ever.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Oh, what, I’m supposed to be cheering? Hooray. Collectively, we can achieve nothing.
Alan Moir summed it up very well in today’s SMH cartoon
http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2008/12/10/1112_cartoon_gallery__600x361,0.jpg
SJT, collectively you lot never achieve anything except to impoverish us all with your harebrained emission trading scheme.
SJT “Oh, what, I’m supposed to be cheering? Hooray. Collectively, we can achieve nothing”.
Believe it or not, there are a lot of so-called skeptics like myself who support your notion of collectively cutting back emissions. The dispute is over the schedule and the means.
As far back as 1992, Lindzen put out a paper revealing the environmental conflict-of-interest in carbon emissions. Circa 1988, when Hansen made his gloom and doom prophecy, Newsweek magazine declared that the “vast majority of scientists” were in agreement with Hansen. Since then, that has been the rallying cry of activists, lead by major movie stars. Since then, they have managed to put fear into the hearts of people with regard to catastrophic climate change. You can believe that if you want, I don’t, and I’m willing to take the chance that it’s not true.
It’s the average person on the street who does the voting and pays the taxes. That person can look around his/her environment and see that no catastrophe is imminent. I am very aware that such subjective observations can be misleading, but when you look at the available scientific data, can you blame them? Those taxpayers are being lead down the garden path by well-meaning politicians who have bought into a bad arguement. That’s particularly true in Europe, where naivete has reigned supreme.
If you want cutbacks in emissions, collectively, you need to get people like me onside. You’re never going to do that by representing activists like those at realclimate, the kings of consensus and computer modeling. If sea levels start rising dramatically, and I’m able to walk about in Canada in the middle of winter in a tee shirt, then I may get concerned. You’ll point out that it may be too late by then. I don’t think so…I think we’ll cope just fine, as we always have.
I’m supportive of emission cutbacks as long as it doesn’t cripple economies and make the lives of people miserable. If we’re going to do that, however, we need to look carefully at how much to cut back and how quickly.
Since when has the “word” of any euroscum been binding? This is the ancestoral home of the double standard. It is the place that spent 400 years engaged in ruthless colonial exploitation and the last 50 years maximising their selfish distortion of every major commodity and service market.
The end result of these serial market and moral abuses is that both wealth, and the adverse consequences of that wealth, are now concentrated in an area where the local environment is unable to cope with the impacts. And now that their karma is returning home, they now want to internationalise responsibility for the adverse consequences of their ruthless greed while continuing to concentrate the ill-gotten wealth that came from that greed.
Here in Australia, our vegetation and our territorial oceans absorb much more than our total CO2 emissions. The landlocked, vegetationally degraded and “oceanically challenged” europeans would like nothing better than for us to sacrifice our own natural advantages to fix an imaginary problem that is entirely of their own making.
Like, Ian, I am Shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you.
I had so much faith in Brussels to lead the world to a grand collectivist, great leap forward to where the climate never changes and the work week ends on Wednesday. Now, our only hope Left is for Hugo Chavez of Venezuela to assume the moral leadership of righteous anti-carbon pollution forces of the World.
Come on, SJT, Chin up, sing L’Internationale with me, mate!
Arise, wretched of the earth
Arise, convicts of hunger
Reason thunders in its volcano
This is the eruption of the end
Of the past let us wipe the slate clean
Masses, slaves, arise, arise
The world is about to change its foundation
We are nothing, let us be all
|: This is the final struggle
Let us gather together, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be the human race 😐
Oh, wait sorry, that’s a transcript of Jim Hansen’s testimony before the US Senate last year…