The main reason emissions have been going up is the rise of coal — in China, in particular. Coal is now the source of 30 percent of the world’s energy, up from about 25 percent in the mid-1990s. Europe’s initiatives have had no effect on China’s policies or the global coal burn. Indeed, the initiatives have probably made the situation worse. As the price of energy has increased using current renewables, energy-intensive industries are being driven offshore, only for their products to be imported back into the European Union.

By the standards of the Kyoto accord, Europe looks good. But those standards measure each country’s production — not consumption — of carbon. This has created counterproductive incentives. If steel plants are closed in Britain and replaced by steel imports from China, Britain counts that as a success. Between 1990 and 2005, Britain’s carbon production fell by about 15 percent — but its carbon consumption rose by 19 percent, when imports were counted. The rest of Europe has been deindustrializing too, and this has also encouraged energy-intensive production to move overseas.

Contrast this with the United States, which declined to ratify the Kyoto agreement because China and other developing countries were not required to do much. America has only the crudest energy policy. And yet its carbon emissions have been falling sharply. Why? Because the United States is switching from coal to gas. At the same time, Europe is moving from gas, which is expensive there, to much more polluting coal — especially in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants following the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Europe’s “answer” to global warming is wind farms and other current renewables. But the numbers won’t ever add up. It just isn’t possible to reduce carbon emissions much with small-scale disaggregated wind turbines. There isn’t enough land for biofuels, even if corn-based ethanol were a good idea (a questionable proposition). Current renewable-energy sources cannot bridge the gap if we are to move away from carbon-intensive energy production. So we will need new technologies while in the meantime slowing the coal juggernaut.

There are three sensible ways to do this: tax carbon consumption (including imports); accelerate the switch from coal to gas; and support and finance new technologies rather than pouring so much money into wind and biofuels.