Commentary: Hypocrisy From Brits and Krauts
A Publication of The Electricity Journal Volume 15, Number 48
Monday, September 11, 2000
By David Wojick (dwojick@shentel.net)
The German and British environment ministers -- Jurgen Trittin and Michael Meacher -- are major league hypocrites for criticizing the U.S. negotiating position on Kyoto. Moreover, they may have a global agenda that is fundamentally anti-U.S.
The United States says it needs "maximum flexibility" and a global trading regime to even consider adopting the Kyoto Protocol. Trittin and Meacher say the U.S. is lying and that compliance should start at home. The hypocrisy is that domestic compliance is pretty much a free ride for Germany and Britain, while virtually impossible for the U.S., at least as far as electric power is concerned.
Mind you, I think that Kyoto is junk, but thatıs not the point. I resent these pious green fools misrepresenting my country. Moreover, I just happen to be finishing a little study for the Greening Earth Society that sheds a bright light on this issue. Here are the surprising facts.
Between 1990, the base year for Kyoto compliance, and 1997, Britainıs annual electric power demand did not increase at all. In fact it has barely increased, about 14 percent, since 1976. Britain is not growing, period, so cutting emissions to a little less than 1990 levels is not all that hard for them. The fact that they switched a lot of generating capacity from coal to gas since 1990, for reasons having nothing to do with climate change, only makes it easier.
Germanyıs Kyoto ride is even easier. Thanks to reunification with the collapsing former East German economy, Germanyıs electric power demand actually fell 7 percent between 1990 and 1997. Ironically, the greens call the Kyoto credit benefits of collapsing Soviet bloc economies "hot air." Germany apparently has hot air to spare.
The United States, on the other hand, is still a developing country. Electric power usage grew about 20 percent between 1990 and 1997, part of a pattern of growth that has not slackened since the 1940ıs. Most of this power comes from fossil fuels, and we want the growth to continue, so domestic fossil fuel cuts to below 1990 levels are simply impossible. We canıt get there from here, period. Unless the economy collapses, of course, but thatıs not something we want to initiate in the name of climate change mitigation.
Japan and the other non-European Union developed countries, like Canada and Australia, are in the same still-developing boat. In fact, Japanıs power usage grew by 23 percent between 1990 and 1997, even faster than our growth. Yet Trittin and Meacher say that "the United States, Canada and Japan have refused even to negotiate with the E.U. on its proposal to require at least 50 percent of each countriesı emission reduction commitments to be met through domestic action."
Damn right. We wonıt negotiate because they want us to do something that shouldn ıt be done -- to stop growing. In fact, there is a suspicious dynamic to all of this bull roar. None of the E.U. countries have grown appreciably since 1990, as far as electric power usage is concerned, while all of the non E.U. "umbrella group" countries continue to develop rapidly. The low growth E.U. is the big backer of Kyoto. And the very slowest E.U. growers -- Germany and Britain -- are the loudest to demand that we stop growing too.
Is it possible that Jurgen Trittin and Michael Meacher, and their bosses and E.U. colleagues, are well aware that doing what they demand would require us to reduce our domestic growth to their sluggish level? Itıs not like these numbers are a secret. --David Wojick
The Electricity Daily
Publisher: Elsevier Science Inc.
Editor: Kennedy Maize
KMaize@aol.com (301) 834-8098, fax (301) 834-5157