Check the browser version. SAY European leaders talk a good game about saving the planet. In environmental politics, as in most other kinds, image control is half the battle. It's not the environment. All this indicates that Europeans have learned how to talk the talk.
European environmentalism is a very public, often theatrical, cause.
Activists have the ubiquity and appeal of Swampy, a popular British road warrior who lived in tunnels and treehouses this year to protest the building of new highways through the countryside. Or the clout of German antinuclear demonstrators, who delayed a rail shipment of nuclear waste in lower Saxony for days last spring, at enormous cost to the government. In the Netherlands municipalities have taken dramatic steps to reduce waste, like charging individual households by the kilo for the garbage they produce. The problem is that behind the screen of public attitudes and good p.r. European leaders may point smugly to their recent declines in greenhouse-gas emissions, but they did little to accomplish this feat.