Amid grandiosity sure to suffuse the summit starting soon in Paris, leaders of impossibly many countries will claim also to lead international efforts to mitigate climate change.
Yet leadership, by definition, is limiting. A crowd of leaders is a group unled.
That observation won't moderate the Paris meeting. Participants will be eminences accustomed to getting what they want. If a reputation for leadership in the fashioning of a global agreement on climate change is what they want, leadership is what they'll provide, come fiery realms or rising sea levels.
Everyone else should start hoarding firewood. Any deal wrought from the contest of egos in Paris would make useful and convenient energy very expensive.
In fact, claims to climate leadership now come late.
Clearly, Europe leads. European countries were the first to set national targets for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases. Europe created the first emissions trading scheme of meaningful scale.
Europe also has punishingly high electricity prices and the economic problems that always follow. And the emissions trading scheme has worked poorly except as an opportunity for fraud.
Among individual countries, the UK can claim to lead, with its early and aggressive emission targets, energy policy oriented to climate precaution, and generous subsidies for renewable energy.
Now the UK government is leading away from the consequent mess.
Amber Rudd, the energy and environment minister, announced in a Nov. 18 speech that policy now will replace coal use in power generation with natural gas and nuclear energy. And it will slash subsidies for wind. The government earlier cut subsidies for solar power.
Predictably, environmental groups welcomed the phaseout of coal but slammed support for natural gas.
But the government, recognizing how much pain its earlier approach inflicted on energy consumers, seems resolved. Climate change no longer will be the priority.
"Energy security has to be the number-one priority," Rudd said at one point. At another: "Green energy must be cheap energy."
That, finally, represents genuine leadership on climate change.
Bob Tippee | Editor
Bob Tippee has been chief editor of Oil & Gas Journal since January 1999 and a member of the Journal staff since October 1977. Before joining the magazine, he worked as a reporter at the Tulsa World and served for four years as an officer in the US Air Force. A native of St. Louis, he holds a degree in journalism from the University of Tulsa.
