Kyoto, Quotas and Fashion Statements.

Well, it looks like the UK is the bad boy again. We are not meeting our renewables target.

All you grubby little Englanders - hang your heads in shame. Here is the offending graph. (see The EU Energy Portal )

But the funny thing is, that on the same website just a bit further up the page is a neat little bar graph related to progress towards the Kyoto protocol. Whatever you think of Kyoto it was at least aimed at reducing emissions and gave some figures.
Here is the graph.

Now in this graph, far from being the nasty bully-boy bad-guys pumping the filth out into the atmosphere, grubby little England is actually one of the golden halo'd nations that have not only reduced emmissions, but have actually reduced them more than their allocated quota.

Even our Eco-zealot friends in Germany have not managed to do so well. But now, of course, our German friends have also shut down all their nuclear power plants and started burning coal like it is going out of fashion. I expect that very soon they will be slipping into the bad boy red sector. In fact they are likely to join their eco friends in Denmark who are spectacularly under target.

Then there is Spain.

Oh dear Oh dear.

Although Spain ranks as number 3 in the European wind turbine league they are also number 3 from the bottom of the Kyoto table. Bad Bad Bad.

Now, of course there are a couple of little issues here. Not all the Kyoto targets are the same. The UK's target was 12.5%. Germany bigged theirs up to 18% and Denmark did the most grandstanding by stating that they would cut their emissions by no less than 21%. Spain though was actually allowed to increase their emissions by 15%

Big words from Germany. Even bigger words from Denmark.

Or was it just hot air?

Obviously, we need to compare like with like.

So let us use the UK as the benchmark and compare how our European pals are really doing.

So, the base line is the UK. We have exceeded our target reduction by 7.63%. As our target was 12.5%, that makes about a real cut of over 20%

Our German friends, (remember this was before they shut down their nuclear power) had a target of 18% and exceeded their target by 1.52%. So their real cut is 19.5%

Demark did the most grandstanding at Kyoto and took the applause for promising to cut emissions by 21% (Huhhah!) but they have missed their target by no less than 16.42%. Whoops! That is a real cut then of less than 5% OUCH!

But then we come to Spain.

Oh Dear Oh Dear.

Spain was allowed to increase their emissions by 15%. But they still missed their target by 22.35% So compared to us un-green nasty little Englanders, the Spanish have made a real cut of...

Well, there is no cut, real or otherwise.

Their emissions have increased by nearly a third. Doh!

Now let us look at the relevence of these two targets.

The "renewables" target has been put in place to meet (among other targets) the 2012 Kyoto quota's.

Germany has the largest number of wind turbines in Europe, Spain comes a close second. Denmark has by far the highest per capita fleet of turbines anywhere in the world.

But all to no avail. While they may have all grandstanded at Kyoto about how green they were, and while they have foolishly wasted billions on intermittent, unreliable and ultimately ineffective wind turbines, they have, on a real comparison failed to even match the UK cuts, let alone meet their bigged up targets.

There is one year left to run for Kyoto. I'll be interested to see if they pay the fines for missing the "legally binding" Kyoto targets.