Restrictions on greenhouse-gas emissions involve huge costs for uncertain gains and are just what economies in recession don't need.
Western European leaders are the latest to discover that climate-change talk is cheap, but carbon-emissions regulation is expensive. That might be bad news for green activists, but it could be very good news for Europeans worried about their jobs and their economy, says the Wall Street Journal.
Governments in industry-heavy countries are now less willing to sacrifice jobs for cooler temperatures:
- Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted on exemptions for her country's industry from December's European Union (EU) climate package, which pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
- Germany also plans to build several dozen coal-fired power plants in the next few years.
- Italy insisted on a clause in the December climate deal that requires the EU to renegotiate its climate policy after the United Nations summit in Copenhagen later this year. [I.e., get the good press, then renege]
- Any renegotiated EU deal is likely to contain even more loopholes and exemptions to keep from denting European competitiveness.
Before the December negotiations, the London-based think tank Open Europe estimated the EU climate package would cost governments, businesses and householders in the EU-25 more than $102 - billion - a year -.
A recent paper by Gabriel Calzada Álvarez, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, said that since Spain started investing in "green jobs" policies in 2000, the country has lost 110,500 jobs in other parts of the economy. That amounts to 2.2 jobs lost for every new "green job" created.
A global slowdown and an increasing body of evidence is forcing a rethink on whether emissions control is worth the cost...
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