Anyway, I speculated a while back that absorbing Eastern Europe might have made it easier for Europe to promise climate reductions, via joint implementation of goals. I think this graph suggests that it did, and even more directly than I was imagining:
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| IPCC 2007, Climate Change 2007: Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg3/en/figure-4-6.html |
The red line roughly in the middle of the graph, labeled "Non-OECD Europe and EECCA", contains Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. This reminds me that Russia caught a huge break in the Kyoto Protocol (not by accident, either). The emissions reductions called for in Kyoto are indexed off of 1990, but Russia's economy cratered right after 1990, and when economies crater, their emissions crater as well. So Russia's emissions as of 1997, when Kyoto were signed, were already well below their "target". This made it easy for them to sign. Russia isn't broken out, so for all I know, that big dip in the red line is driven entirely by Russia. But presuming something similar happened in the former Soviet Eastern European countries, they too would have had some hot air - which they would then have brought with them into the EU.
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