UPDATED AGAIN . . .

Over at Climate Progress, Joe Romm asserts that climate policies in the EU represent

a very impressive achievement that should serve as an inspiration to the world.

This is an odd conclusion coming from Joe, since he is often going on about the end of the planet if we don’t act yesterday.

Rather than looking dispassionately at the EU as a forward-think policy laboratory, Joe instead chooses to attack the US and make the issue partisan. A more productive approach would be to look to the admirable EU leadership as an opportunity to learn about the practical challenges of emissions reductions, even when there is strong political support.

The following graph (using data from the US EIA here in .xls) needs little interpretation. It shows post-Kyoto per capita carbon dioxide emissions in each of the EU-15 countires as well as the US for 1997 to 2005 (the last year for which data was available, but I don’t think that extending to 2007 would make much difference). The overwhelming majority of countries of the EU-15 saw per capita emissions increase faster that the US. The lesson that one should take is not that the US is succeeding, but rather that the success of the EU has been overstated, and Joe propagates that myth.

Updates after the jump.

An update. Below is the data for total emissions using a 1997 baseline. Sorry for the poor quality. Quickly done using an old version of Excel.

A second update. The two figures below show the same per capita and total emissions as above for the EU-15 and US, but starting in 1990. The US is in 9th place in the EU-15 plus US for total emissions, and 6th place for per capita emissions.