Listening to the BBC and fashionable commentary you get the impression that the EU is doing a wonderful job tackling CO2 emissions whilst the US is deliberately wrecking progress.

Recent figures produced by the US government and EU governments shows that is far from the truth. Between 2000 and 2004 US emissions of CO2 grew by 1.3%, whilst the EU <a href="mailto:15@s">15’s</a> emissions grew by ??2.4%, almost twice as fast.

Far from hitting their Kyoto targets, many EU countries are??likely to miss.?? It should remind commentators that it’s not signing up to targets that counts, but hitting them.

??Over that time period the US economy grew much much more quickly than the EU economies, adding the equivalent of the economy of Italy to the size of the US output. 11.3 million went to live in the USA. Despite that, and despite the lower growth of the economy and population in the EU fifteen, the US kept its carbon output under much better control.

Instead of lecturing us all endlessly about the subject, the governments of Western Europe should worry about how they are going to hit the targets they so ostentatiously signed up to. The UK will hit its Kyoto target thanks to the favourable impact of electricity privatisation on carbon output, but will not meet the more demanding target Mr Blair set when he realised Kyoto was a shoe in thanks to Conservative actions in the 1990s. There is so much hypocrisy in the way the EU and its governments use the green argument.

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