EU chief's hypocrisy on car emissions

The president of the EU Commission, José Manuel Barroso, has been forced to defend himself against charges of hypocrisy for owning a so-called 'gas-guzzling' 4x4.

While driving a 4x4 is not an activity that someone can come under fire for on this blog, the problem lies in Barroso's abject double standards.

For himself, he chooses the safety, style and driving experience of a 4x4.

But at work heading the European Commission, he piously lectures us all about the urgency of cutting car emissions. Worse, he busies himself making excessive laws aimed at forcing the rest of us who aren't paid out of an apparently bottomless pit of taxpayers' money into tiny city cars, by steadily making anything else unaffordable.

Barroso, who owns a Volkswagen Touareg, said: "I have never spoken of myself as an example to anybody - today's moralistic approach is not mine."

But this is more than a tad rich, coming from the head of a body that, despite its democratic illegitimacy, constantly makes moral choices in a wide range of policy areas and enforces them on us all through EU-wide laws.

Barroso's VW 4x4 emits an above-average level of CO2 of 356 g/km - well above a 130g limit Brussels is seeking to impose on the car industry by 2012. Taken as a whole, the EU Commission's car fleet of 85 vehicles has an average emissions level of more than 258g/km.

Are they doing anything about that? So why should we make sacrifices in our choices?

'Collective action' EU-style

In response to the hypocrisy charge, Mr Barroso bizarrely insisted that fighting climate change was about "collective action" and voiced concern that a focus on an individual's CO2 usage could be a "slippery slope".

Yet most people would understand the simple idea that 'collective action' actually results from the choices of large numbers of individuals.

And few are likely to heed 'encouragements' to make certain perceived pro-environment choices when those doing the encouraging (or more accurately in this case, enforcing through EU law) don't take their own words seriously enough to act on them.

Euro corporatism exposed

Actually Barroso's response provides a chilling exposé of the corporatist mindset of those running the EU, in which 'collective action' comprised of individuals acting in common (for example, in voting for those who govern them) plays no part.

Rather, collective action EU-style is derived through the interaction of bodies taken to speak on behalf of groups of individuals. We individuals ourselves are expected to just do what the annointed 'collective' says.

Hence Barroso's idea that there's no need to focus on individuals, or being remotely credible in front of us.

Certainly, with such a 'don't drive what I do, drive what I say' mindset in evidence at the top of the EU and no appreciation of there being a problem in such an attitude, it's no wonder the EU-led way in which its member countries are increasingly governed is being described as 'neo-feudal'.