I little while ago I noted how one leading Member of the European Parliament – Avril Doyle of Ireland, the website for whose center-right EPP-ED “bloc” styles her as the EP’s “Rapporteur on the Commission’s Proposal for a Directive on the Review of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme” (whew!) – suggested the possibility of a trade war against countries reluctant to adopt the spectacularly successful EU Emissions Trading Scheme.
Her point was that Europe’s adoption of the Lieberman-Warner plan of a cap-and-trade scheme is killing their competitiveness, and they are only willing to wait so long for the rest of us to do it to ourselves, too.
As Avril commented back in May:
“‘[The trade war option is] very much Plan B,’ said Doyle. ‘We don’t even want to discuss it. . . . It’s just on the top shelf there so the rest of the world knows we’re not going to destroy our economies without them coming on board and helping us.”
“Destroy [their] economies”? Wha? But, we, U.S. Americans, are being told by campaigning politicians how energy rationing actually will make us all rich!
Such fears are spreading among her colleagues, apparently. Now the EP’s Industry Committee is looking into exemptions for particularly hard-hit sectors such as steel, and politically sensitive sectors such as transport. They are also asking, at what price climate virtue? (more on that in a bit, I’ve just been sent a copy of a draft from the EP’s Special Global Warming committee, and it’s a howler). Committee members “are mulling an amendment that would demand a full impact assessment before cutting beyond 20 percent.” Uh . . . you’ll all be gazillionaires?
One suggestion was that any decision to make promises beyond the (already rather amusing, given Europe’s record) vow to reduce GHGs by 20 percent below 1990 levels would have to be approved. Predictably, the greens were not amused by even a suggestion of walking back, however slightly, the anti-democratic trend we are seeing in this realm. “The moves aimed at protecting EU industry from overseas competitors have alarmed environmentalists. . . . ‘This could potentially fatally undermine an automatic move to a 30 percent cut in emissions, as the EU would have to go through the whole co-decision procedure,’ WWF campaigner Kirsty Clough said on Thursday.”
Most notable was this gem that slipped in to the Reuters story:
“‘I think we should bring the latest science into any decision,’ Swedish liberal MEP Lena Ek, who drafted the ‘compromise amendments’, told Reuters on Thursday.”
Holy Collapsing Stockholm Syndrome! Could the prisoner be falling out of love with her captor?