Recession Now Blamed for Increased Gas Emissions

Latest reports from the European Environment Agency (EEA) indicate that by 2011 gas emissions on this continent grew by approximately 3.2% as compared with 2010, regardless of how many efforts went into switching to renewable energy sources.

Interestingly enough, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, France and Spain take the lead when it comes to polluting the environment in this manner, as the five of them combined are responsible for roughly 80% of the increase in gas emissions. Studies also point at Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania as major European polluters.

According to theenergycollective.com, as alarming as these figures are, Jacqueline McGlade, the executive director of EEA, argues that “the increase could have been even higher without the fast expansion of renewable energy generation in the EU.”

Thus, when comparing 21st-century century reports on gas emissions in Europe to their 19th-century counterparts, one can easily notice an overall tendency towards steadily cutting down on the amount of harmful substances released into the atmosphere.

Official figures indicate that the continent of Europe now produces about 15.4% less gas emission than it did back in the 90s.

Specialists in the fields of economics and industrial development argued that such a situation was to be expected, as most European countries have only recently begun to come out of recession.

As well as this, it seems that recent long and extremely cold winters also have a thing to say in this matter, as additional amounts of energy had to be used to keep things going as they normally would have.

With Germany, the UK and most other nations continuing to improve on their renewable energy sources, odds are that Europe will succeed in living up to the expectations imposed upon them by the signing of the Kioto Protocol first adopted in 1997, according to which countries around the world have to invest in bringing down greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.