DO AS WE SAY
European leaders talk a good game about saving the planet. But do they back up their greener |
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BY ELIZABETH GLEICK
In environmental politics, as in most other kinds, image control is half the battle. Score one for European leaders, then, who at a United Nations conference last summer made headline-grabbing commitments to achieve large reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions in their countries by the year 2010. When President Bill Clinton refused to join that pledge--he wanted to study the matter further--the message heard round the world seemed clear: on the international environmental stage Europeans were the good guys, and the U.S. was playing the villain. "No country can opt out of global warming or fence in its own private climate," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said pointedly, while Franz-Josef Meiers, a research fellow at the German Association for Foreign Politics in Bonn, observed, "All Clinton seemed to care about was the booming U.S. economy: 'It's the economy, stupid.' It's not the environment."
In many ways Europeans have earned the right to take this greener-than-thou stance. In northern Europe, especially, concern about the planet's woes bred an environmental activism that hit the mainstream in the mid- to late-1980s and is still going strong.
Daily smog reports, recycled toilet paper and canvas shopping bags have become a way of life on the continent; Green parties have representation in 11 out of 15 European Union parliaments; and polls show that the vast majority of citizens place the environment at or near the top of their lists of vital concerns. All this indicates that Europeans have learned how to talk the talk. The question is, do they truly walk the walk? According to Alexander de Roo, an environment expert working for the Green Party at the European Parliament in Brussels, the continent is "very green in its rhetoric but less so in reality."
European environmentalism is a very public, often theatrical, cause. Activists have the ubiquity and appeal of Swampy, a popular British road warrior who lived in tunnels and treehouses this year to protest the building of new highways through the countryside. Or the clout of German antinuclear demonstrators, who delayed a rail shipment of nuclear waste in lower Saxony for days last spring, at enormous cost to the government.
Northern Europeans have also become world trendsetters in recycling--with the exception of the British, who reuse as little as 5% of domestic garbage. The Dutch recycle about 80% of their glass and the Germans some 75%. In the Netherlands municipalities have taken dramatic steps to reduce waste, like charging individual households by the kilo for the garbage they produce. The problem is that behind the screen of public attitudes and good p.r. lies the reality of powerful private interests and traditionally coddled industries--an old order that governments are reluctant to topple. European leaders may point smugly to their recent declines in greenhouse-gas emissions, but they did little to accomplish this feat. Their record got a significant, but temporary, whitewash from the gradual shift away from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas and the closing of East German factories after reunification. Since the 1992 Earth Summit only Denmark has enacted real emissions reform. And despite Blair's strong words, British carbon-dioxide emissions rose 2.9% last year; studies indicate that unless major steps are taken, the amount of gas released will keep climbing several years into the next century. Cynics claim, too, that the reason the E.U. has pushed for slashing greenhouse emissions to 15% below 1990 levels is to get the best of both worlds: credit for a righteous stance, plus the knowledge that the final agreed-upon figure won't be so draconian. Michael Jefferson, deputy secretary-general of the World Energy Council in London, points out that Blair's can-do attitude at the U.N. summit "did not seem to reflect what is actually going on." David Pearce, an economist at University College, London, has found more than $30 billion in British government subsidies that hurt the environment, including tax breaks for company cars and low taxes on gas and electricity--rates that the latest Labour budget lowered even further.
Most serious is the failure to deal with auto exhaust. About 20% of new passenger vehicles sold in Europe run on diesel fuel, which leads to higher particulate and nitrous-oxide emissions than does gasoline. Many European nations, including Greece, Spain and Portugal, still rely on leaded gas. Three-way catalytic converters, which clean up exhaust fumes, are only now becoming common. Meanwhile the number of cars per capita in the E.U. jumped 37% between 1980 and 1990.
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