The European Commission, under the leadership of its new president, Jean-Claude Juncker, is continuing the suicidal “climate change” policies of his predecessor, José Manuel Barroso, that have driven energy costs in the European Union sky high, devastated its industry and agriculture, destroyed jobs, and put the entire EU economy on the skids.
Even the Washington Post, ordinarily a boisterous cheerleader for every policy proposal that claims to be combatting the non-existent threat of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, or AGW, editorially acknowledged last year that the EU “has become a green-energy basket case. Instead of a model for the world to emulate, Europe has become a model of what not to do.”
Dr. Benny Peiser, director of the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation warns that the EU’s climate policies are especially harming Europe’s poor. “As wealthy homeowners and business owners install wind turbines on their land and solar panels on their homes and commercial buildings, low-income families all over Europe have had to foot the skyrocketing electric bills,” Dr. Peiser told the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on December 2. “This winter millions of families will have to choose between heating and eating. Many can no longer afford to pay, so the utilities are cutting off their power.”
Nevertheless, the EU Commission is piling on still more regulations, pressing for even more unsustainable “green energy,” and pushing for adoption of a more stringent global treaty at the UN’s climate conference in Paris in 2015.
At a meeting on December 17 in Brussels, EU environment ministers reached an agreement on new EU-wide rules for CO2emissions from ships. They also agreed on new rules to limit the use of lightweight plastic bags across the EU and new rules restricting emissions from medium-size combustion plants.
Pressure From Above and Below
In a blog post the following day, December 18, entitled “Fighting for a Happy Ending to Global Climate Talks,” Miguel Arias Canete, President Juncker’s European commissioner for energy and climate action, called upon “the world's citizens to put sustained pressure on their leaders over the next twelve months.”
Referring to the upcoming UN Paris confab, Canete wrote: “What is clear is that there will be an even greater need for the world's citizens to put sustained pressure on their leaders over the next twelve months to get them to face up to their responsibilities. Public pressure helped push EU leaders to set our own climate targets in October this year.” (What Canete doesn’t mention, of course, is that — as in the United States — the “public pressure” he credits with winning the support of EU leaders for the destructive climate policies, has been provided by phony “grassroots” NGOs lavishly funded by governments, Wall Street billionaires, and the huge tax-exempt foundations).
“So my priority over the next few months will be making sure that other countries match our level of ambition in their own pledges, and they show how they will actually meet those pledges,” Canete continued. “Ultimately though, peer pressure can only achieve so much. It needs be accompanied by pressure from below. World leaders will only act, be ambitious, and sign a deal if they are held to account by their citizens, not just their fellow leaders.”
“That is why,” says Canete, “we must all do what we can to speak out, keep the pressure on all countries to be as ambitious and transparent and possible, and make sure climate change has a top billing for the next year.”
In his Senate testimony, Dr. Benny Peiser provided a compelling, detailed explanation of why the EU should not follow Commissioner Canete’s destructive recommendations, and why the United States should reject the path already taken by Europe. “For the last 20 years, Europe has felt a duty to set an example through radical climate policy-making at home,” said Dr. Peiser. “European leaders were convinced that the development of a low-carbon economy based on renewables would give Europe a competitive advantage. It was in this political climate that the EU heads of state and government launched the so-called Lisbon Strategy in March 2000, with the goal of making Europe ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.’”
This was followed by the European Commission’s European Climate Change Programme (EECP) and the EU’s approval of the UN Kyoto Protocol.
“Today, 14 years after the EU adopted these key policies,” noted Peiser, “the economies of most EU member states are stagnating or in decline. Last week the OECD warned that the crisis-ridden EU poses a major threat to the world economy.”
In terms of impact on global climate, the EU’s climate program has been all pain (for taxpayers and consumers) and no gain — except for the corporations that have cashed in on the “green” programs and/or shifted their production to less regulated developing countries. “Even though EU policy has managed to reduce CO2 emissions domestically,” Peiser notes, “this was only achieved by shifting energy-intensive and heavy industries overseas: to locations where there are no stringent emission limits, where energy and labour is cheap and which are now growing much faster than the EU.” Most products consumed in the EU today, he points out, are imported from countries without any binding CO2 targets. “It is no surprise that while the EU’s domestic CO2 emissions have fallen, if you factor in CO2 emissions embedded in goods imported into EU, the figure remains substantially higher,” says Peiser.
