The White House claim that that the United States is doing better than Europe in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is based on 'cherry picked' climate data, the independent think tank Pacific Institute revealed today.
The false claim, most recently repeated by Science Advisor to the President John Marburger, most recently on Thursday, is backed by looking at a single greenhouse gas over a narrow timeline, Dr. Peter H. Gleick of the institute explaind.
According to Dr. Gleick, a look at the full range of gases over a longer period, clearly demonstrates that the European Union is curbing greenhouse gas emissions more aggressively and successfully than the US.
Dr. Gleick accused Christopher Horner, a well-known climate skeptic from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, of being the first to propagate the myth when he wrote in a Washington Times op-ed that "Pick any year since the Kyoto Protocol was agreed to in 1997, Mr. Bush should have said, and the U.S. CO2 emission performance is superior to that of all major Kyoto parties, including and most notably Europe."
"Europe's CO2 emissions are rising twice as fast as those of the U.S. since Kyoto, three times as fast since 2000. This figure balloons to more than five times as fast when one tallies the individual country average of the EU-15," Horner added.
Dr. Gleick criticised the Bush administration for using this false assertion to justify not agreeing to carbon caps.
"I would point out that the carbon -- that there is a carbon cap system in place in Europe.," Bush's Press Secretary Tony Snow said five days after the op-ed was published. "We are doing a better job of reducing emissions here."
When any year other than 2000 is selected as the base year, and when all greenhouse gases covered by the UN Framework Convention are included in the analysis, the claims of Horner and the White House that the US is outperforming the EU turn out to be lies, Dr. Gleick argued.
Over the entire period from 1990 to 2004 US greenhouse gas emissions grew more than 15% while emissions from the 15 countries of the European Union (the EU-15) declined by around 1%.
Even when carbon dioxide is the only gas evaluated, the EU-15 does far better than the US over the proper period from 1990 to 2004 as US carbon dioxide emissions grew almost 18% over that period, while EU-15 CO2 emissions grew 8.6%, according to Department of Energy statistics cited by the scientist.
Dr. Gleick explained that between 2000 and 2001, US greenhouse gas emissions temporarily declined because of the modest economic slowdown and the dramatic drop in air traffic and travel following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The scientist emphasised that this had nothing to do with White House policy.
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