Australia tells EU to do more on emissions - Reuters

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

Australia tells EU to do more on emissions

By James Grubel
2 hours, 12 minutes ago

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia called on the European Union on Tuesday to do
more to cut its own greenhouse emissions before lecturing Kyoto skeptics Australia
and the United States about climate change.

Australia and the United States have refused to ratify the Koyto Protocol which
sets binding limits on reducing greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.

EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said on Monday Australia and the United
States were hampering efforts to tackle climate change, prompting a rebuke from
Prime Minister John Howard, who said 12 EU nations were in danger of missing their
Kyoto targets.

"You've got the spokesman for a group of countries lecturing us about not having
signed Kyoto, yet the great bulk of the countries on whose behalf he speaks are
falling well behind their Kyoto targets and are doing less well than Australia in
meeting them," Howard told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

"Our answer to the spokesman for the European Union is look to your own affairs,
get your countries complying with the targets you've proclaimed," he said.

-snip-

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070403/sc_nm/globalwarming_australia1_dc_1

[GliderGuider]

1. The latest revelations in the EU have undercut their moral high ground

The report on the ineffectiveness of EU's cap-and-trade system has made it a bit more difficult for them to wag their finger at places like Australia. Now if only Aus would take this opportunity to actually do something significant themselves and throw it back in Europe's face. Now if only pigs could fly.

[Dirk_H]

2. Europe has already done much more than Australia and the US

Energy consumption (and consequently greenhouse gas emission) per capita is almost 50% higher in Australia (and almost 100% higher in the US) than in the EU.
Furthermore Australia (and also the US) are far behind Europe in the utilisation of renewable energies, though the conditions for wind and solar power are much better there than in Europe. So I think Europe has some reason to lecture countries, that do much less than they could.

[razzleberry]

3. Europe has done what, exactly?

Europe has a toothless self-imposed carbon limit on
certain industires.

Europe's business-as-usual Kyoto treaty policy,
seems intent on using dubious carbon credits,
to get the numbers to add up.
No sacrifice needed.

[Nihil]

4. Listen spammer ...

... the carbon trading shit is exactly that and is realised as such
by most thinking people. That does not mean that you have to post
the same shit on every thread that mentions "Europe"!

:argh:

As the previous poster pointed out in no uncertain terms, Europe
has done much more than one flaky political scam but, let's face it,
if your attention span is limited to a single chant, there's not much
hope that you'd be able to understand that is there?

If you do want to learn, try following up some of his/her points
w.r.t. per-capita energy usage (or, in your case, wastage).

[Dirk_H]

5. As I mentioned above,..

...Europe consumes significant less energy (per capita) than Australia and particularly the US,
in spite of a similar standard of living and economical output.
This is an obvious fact and not the result of dubious accounting tricks.
There are several reasons, why Europe (and btw also Japan) is obviously more "energy-efficient".
To mention only some (and to answer your question, what Europe has done exactly):
- energy consumption is heavily taxed across Europe. This encourages energy saving.
- people are teached to behave ecologically sensible
- capaple and efficent public transport systems exists and are widely used
- very high energy saving standards, especially for buildings, are enforced by law
- huge investments in renewable energies are triggered by subsidies

[razzleberry]

6. those are not changes

for the most part, what you wrote,
are not changes.
Existing situations. And stuff they would do anyway.

Current numbers indicate, that EU carbon use is going up,
not down, as required by their ratification of the Kyoto protocol.
therefore, I assume that the EU would have to buy credits from
Russia or use CERs from non-Annex-1 countries.
Are they even going to do that?

as for dubious accounting, you might want to take a look
at this carbon shellgame.
http://www.sinkswatch.org/projects/plantar.html#pcf