Et Tu, Europe?

Usually, I try to avoid the smugness Europeans like to pretend they don't indulge in, and had been grateful for the moderately more effective response by the EU towards the credit crisis.

I had also been happier with the greater concern - comparatively - that Europe had shown towards global warming and its related bag of terrors, than some other developed countries.

But I was disheartened, to say the least, to see the following posted on the New York Times website today:

European Nations Seek to Revise Agreement on Emissions Cuts

"BRUSSELS — Fears of a sharp worldwide economic slowdown are threatening a hard-won European plan on climate change that European leaders hoped would set an example for the rest of the world.

At a rancorous summit meeting this week of the European Union’s heads of state, several Eastern European countries and Italy said they might no longer be able to afford to slash greenhouse gas emissions as envisioned under a broad plan agreed upon last year and would need some concessions from other countries in the bloc. That agreement called for the union to reduce such emissions, linked by climate scientists to global warming, by 20 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020.

The plan — hailed by the former French president Jacques Chirac as “a great moment in European history” — goes beyond the Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrial nations bound by the treaty to reduce the emission of global-warming gases by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

After the outline was agreed to last year, the countries began working on detailed proposals for how they would reach the goal for emissions cuts, which essentially meant figuring out how much of an economic burden each nation would bear. France, which holds the rotating presidency of the union, had hoped to win approval for a more detailed agreement in December.

While some countries had already begun worrying about how much they were being asked to contribute to hit the emissions reduction goal, the economic downturn increased their concerns."

Read the rest here.

And if you're in mind to get an astrological perspective of the rather gobsmacking changes we're living through, check out the humour, insight and analysis at the wonderful Astrotabletalk blog, run by Dharmaruci.