The EU’s Climate Change Effort Is Comically Exaggerated
Tyler Durden
Sat, 07/18/2020 – 08:10
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,
The EU is at the head of the pack in climate change cheating and hypocrisy…
Climate Change Cheating and Hypocrisy
Eurointelligence comments on the EU’s Exaggerated Climate Change Spending.
We note that the European Court of Auditors is becoming increasingly nervous about the European Commission’s overblown claims about its programmes.
The auditors specifically looked at agricultural policies and structural funds, and concluded that the proportion of funds earmarked for climate change is almost comically exaggerated. The worst offender is agriculture. The plan had been to reserve half of the €100bn spent on agriculture for climate protection. The Commission counts subsistence payments to farmers as climate spending, so long as the farmers fulfil some nominal climate standards which almost every farmer does.
On spending programmes, the EU uses an old-fashioned rounding trick. The OECD has recommended a simplified category whereby governments count the climate-protection share of their expenditures in steps of 0, 40% or 100%. What the Commission does is to round expenditures up to the next level.
Over the years, we have noted an increasing tendency by the Commission to make dishonest claims about its programmes. This is also why we have become very sceptical about any headlines coming out of Brussels. The headline numbers usually conflate different categories of money, and do not translate into reality.
US Gasoline Reduction Effort Underway
If people don’t work, they don’t drive to work.
On that basis, we should should count every penny of pandemic assistance as part of our global warming effort because pandemic assistance enables people to not work.
That’s $3 trillion and counting. What did the EU spend?
Also note that Work-From-Home Will Reduce Driving by 270 Billion Miles Per Year.
270 billion miles divided by 15 miles per gallon = 18 billion in gasoline reduction. If we round that to the nearest 30 billion then we save 30 billion of gas every year.
Want a bigger reduction?
We can save 27 billion gallons annually by lowering the MPG estimate to 10 miles per gallon.
Rounded to the nearest 50 billion gallons, 27 billion morphs into a reduction of 50 billion gallons of gas per year.
Trump vs the EU
By the EU’s methodology, Trump clobbers the EU by orders of magnitude when it comes to money spent to defeat global warming.
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