OGJ Editorial: The EU's Energy Setback

Sept. 9, 2002
The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development advanced from a position of early triumph to end last week with laudable self-restraint. As already noted here, the agenda in Johannesburg, South Africa, gave concern about poverty righteous prominence (OGJ, Sept. 2, 2002, p. 17).

The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development advanced from a position of early triumph to end last week with laudable self-restraint. As already noted here, the agenda in Johannesburg, South Africa, gave concern about poverty righteous prominence (OGJ, Sept. 2, 2002, p. 17). And the action plan that resulted from 10 days of meetings proposed nothing in the areas of climate change and renewable energy to compromise that priority. For the European Union, this regulatory reluctance was a major setback. The EU has marginalized itself with state-centered dogmatism. On climate change and renewable energy, it asserts grand objectives and snubs dissent. Among its stated priorities for the Johannesburg meeting were to "limit climate change and increase the use of clean energy" (see related stories, this issue).

Changing habits

Lofty goals, these. Achieving them would require people to change habits and pay more than they do now for energy, directly and through higher taxes. Goals involving so much intrusion by governments in human life should be open to question. Are they necessary? Are they achievable? Is government intervention in markets and lives the right way to pursue them? The EU will have none of that. EU officials went to Johannesburg seeking not discussion but "concrete action," according to a strategy document. They sought new commitments by countries to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. They sought requirements that 10-15% of primary energy come from renewable sources by 2010.

They had to settle for much less. On climate change the action plan adopted at the meeting mainly restated support for existing initiatives-although Canada and Russia consoled the EU by promising to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. And, without setting targets, the action plan merely called on countries to "work with urgency to substantially increase" reliance on renewable energy. What's important here is not who won what in a diplomatic contest. It's international repudiation of the EU's imperious approach to energy and the climate.

The EU has never made a compelling case for aggressive response to climate change. It has just nodded toward complex and controversial UN studies of the issue, incorrectly asserted scientific consensus about the need for costly precaution, supported heavy taxation of carbon emissions, and scolded countries unwilling to suspend critical thought on the subject, especially the US. The organization treats disagreement with disdain and explains away slow action on international climate agreements as emblematic of-in the words of its strategy statement-"a lack of political will in industrialized societies."

To the EU, global warming is less an area of scientific inquiry than a compulsion for governments to raise taxes, mandate energy choices, and otherwise rearrange human life. "Sustainable development demands a fundamental change in the way we live," it says in the strategy document. "Breaking with the past calls for a major reorientation of public and private behavior and thinking."

Fundamental changes in how people live? Major reorientation of behavior and thought? Who will impose these adjustments? The EU? The rest of the world apparently doesn't think so.

The EU's own strategy statement fosters skepticism. After appealing for the reoriented behavior and thinking it says, "The challenge is to pursue economic growth with social concerns and to decouple economic development from environmental degradation." This assertion of the self-evident might have been challenging three decades ago. Now it just seems haughty and dated, contrived to summon regulation into inappropriate realms. The EU overlooks 3 decades or so of evolution in the process of industrialization. It's no longer possible, if it ever was, to pursue economic growth in isolation from social concern; the modern challenge is turning general social concern into specific human welfare. Also, it should be clear by now that environments degrade most where economies develop least. And it's equally clear that overregulated development is never sustainable.

Energy and freedom

Prosperity favors freedom. In free societies, governments don't tell energy producers what to sell or energy consumers what to buy. Free choices made by free people aren't always the "cleanest" ones by some government's definition of the term. But they're always the best ones for-first-human welfare and-ultimately, therefore-the environment. With its focus on poverty and rebuke to central planning on energy, the world seemed, in the meeting at Johannesburg, to be getting its priorities right.