At least not when it looks like America won’t be able to pick up the tab any more in the form of subsidies, tourism and consumer spending. Most of Europe’s “generous” welfare policies make those countries ill equipped to throw billions of dollars away on green schemes that are designed to make people feel good at the expense of their quality of life.

From the NYT:

BRUSSELS — Fears of a sharp worldwide economic slowdown are threatening a hard-won European plan on climate change that European leaders hoped would set an example for the rest of the world.

At a rancorous summit meeting this week of the European Union’s heads of state, several Eastern European countries and Italy said they might no longer be able to afford to slash greenhouse gas emissions as envisioned under a broad plan agreed upon last year and would need some concessions from other countries in the bloc. That agreement called for the union to reduce such emissions, linked by climate scientists to global warming, by 20 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020.

The plan — hailed by the former French president Jacques Chirac as “a great moment in European history” — goes beyond the Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrial nations bound by the treaty to reduce the emission of global-warming gases by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

After the outline was agreed to last year, the countries began working on detailed proposals for how they would reach the goal for emissions cuts, which essentially meant figuring out how much of an economic burden each nation would bear. France, which holds the rotating presidency of the union, had hoped to win approval for a more detailed agreement in December.

While some countries had already begun worrying about how much they were being asked to contribute to hit the emissions reduction goal, the economic downturn increased their concerns.

At this week’s two-day meeting, which ended Thursday, the countries that were questioning the plan won the right for any of the 27 members of the bloc to veto it. They also refused to set December as a goal for completing negotiations, though they said they would try.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, who led the assault on the package, said: “We don’t think this is the moment to push forward on our own like Don Quixote. We have time.”

Indeed. The pursuit of destructive green policies was always Quixotic in many ways. The real goal of the green movement isn’t a cleaner planet but the “Re-Wilding” of the world. Re-Wilding is a sort of Anarcho-primitivism where those suffering the ennui of modern life romanticize and adopt what they perceive to be as a more sustainable “primitive” lifestyle. Similar to historical trekkers or people (like myself) who practice “traditional” skills, the Re-Wilders differ in their desire for the collapse of industrialized society despite the millions of deaths such a thing would cause.

Greens want the world to end, thus their destructive policies. It is telling that in Europe it took a global financial crisis to make politicians admit that those policies were bad for their countries.