Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Kyoto Not Working for the EU

By

The EU’s emissions trading scheme has so far failed to deliver any reductions in CO2 emissions while at the same time strangling energy-efficiency investment in the electricity sector. Read more here.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Larry says

    Before giving my take on this latest development, I’ll ask and partially answer a question that has some bearing on Anthropogenic Global Warming Disasterism (AGWD), and on ETS and other ‘mitigation’ efforts. For a variety of reasons, my opinion is that AGWD is one of the biggest scientific frauds perpetrated during my lifetime. IPCC ‘scientists’ are every bit as bad as economists. The logical question: Why are so many scientists–who are not involved in the fraud–willing to turn a blind eye to the IPCC codswallop? There are at least two reasons.

    First, it’s the path of least resistance. A scientist who is actively involved in research in Field A is not likely to spend a lot of time scrutinizing Field B. The attitude: I’ll defer to your judgment if you’ll defer to mine. It’s a variation on the theme of the Old Boy Network.

    I have a friend who’s a world-class mathematician and astrophysicist, and who has had his own run-ins with academic mafias. Nevertheless he was surprised when I told him about Nils-Axel Mörner’s whistle-blowing on IPCC sea-level ‘studies’.

    More to the point, the real problem for technologically advanced countries is that we’re rapidly depleting global reserves of natural gas and easily-extracted oil. The rational thing to do is to make the infrastructure changes that are necessary for a ‘soft landing’ when the fit hits the shan, and world production of these two fossil fuels starts declining, in the face of increasing demand, and prices for oil and natural gas go through the roof. (I’m looking beyond the current worldwide economic $hit-storm.)

    Here in the U.S. there’s been a strange mindset about the long-term energy problem. Back in the 1970s, President Carter sounded the alarm a bit too early. The public response: Oh, we’ve got plenty of oil. Translation: I don’t give a rat’s arse; I’ll be dead long before it becomes a real problem. But this is a country where myopia is seldom out of fashion.

    Western Europeans have been more proactive about energy. Even before Kyoto, Western Europeans had high petrol taxes and serious investment in public transportation, for example. But they may be making a virtue out of necessity. Europe does not have the huge reserves of coal and expensive-to-process-at-current-prices tar sands that North America does. Even in Western Europe, there are limits on what steps the public will take in order to avoid a legacy of economic disaster for their grandchildren.

    Now, along comes the CO2 Monster. Whaddayaknow? It turns out that energy conservation and renewable energy technology are on both mitigation lists. By remaining silent about the AGWD scam, knowledgeable scientists thought that they were indirectly promoting a long-term albeit back-door energy strategy.

    However the recent article is now calling that assumption into question. I’m guessing that the article is accurate. Given that, plus the nascent global-cooling trend, Psychic Larry predicts mass defections of knowledgeable scientists from the AGWD camp. I’m looking forward to a day in the near future when we can have a sunset celebration for Kyoto.