egg,
Sounds great, doesn't it? Except the European Union has adjusted it's baseline 1990 levels up several times. And as a whole, the European Union benefits from being able to include many Warsaw Pact countries that had shit economies in 1990 as part of their baseline. Germany, for example, gets to include East Germany as its baseline, and they benefit because many East German factories were shut down. Not because they had excess capacity, but because they were not profitable. And even then, Germany has not yet reached its Kyoto target.
The 1990 baseline has been heavily debated. Many European nations were switching to natural gas from coal for heating for reasons outside of signing Kyoto. Use a different baseline, say 1997 when the treaty was announced, or 2002 when the EU actually ratified it, and those numbers don't look so great. But hey, good job to the EU for negotiating a good treaty for themselves. If they are actually increasing emissions every year since 2000, it's no big deal.
And many of the countries that report decreases do so with the help of carbon credits. At one time, each country was supposed to do an 8% decrease, but the EU changed it to 8% collectively. Are we really doing that much for the earth by
paying other people to let us pollute? If only we let Enron stick around for a little longer, they could have spent enough money to get carbon trading to market earlier, and really helped
make themselves money save the environment.
Also, I should have been more careful with my language. When mentioning "carbon", I should have said CO2, and under the Bush administration, our rate of increase is lower than EUs. Since 1990, that may not be the case, but most of that increase came under Cliton's tenure, just to be fair.
