It's interesting that Conservatives in Canada and the UK are persona non grata in the world community this week. British PM Cameron opted out of a pan-EU deal to grant the EU more veto power over national deficits and centralizing financial markets. Canada's Conservative government is under fire for bailing out of the Kyoto Treaty. Environment minister Peter Kent opted to wait until he returned from a global climate summit in South Africa to drop that bombshell; he might not have made it out of Durban alive had he given the ideological middle-digit salute to Kyoto.
His Liberal predecessor as environment minister had a husky named after the treaty, but conservatives both big and small c think the treaty is a dog, especially when the two biggest CO2 belchers, the US and China, are outside of the treaty. Rather than try to make good on CO2 cut pledges and mess with the Canadian economy, the Harper government has opted to pull the plug on a deal that is struggling to make sense and live up to its goals.
The Euro seems, with a large dose of 20-20 hindsight, to be a fellow dawg of a deal. The fiscal controls that the EU is seeking is what is needed to keep a stable Euro, since a common currency needs a somewhat common fiscal policy between countries; it was the lack of teeth for countries that want to go to the Obama School of Fiscal Policy that helped cause the Euro's headaches of the present hour.
However, that common fiscal policy might not suit your nation's needs. The UK ran into that in the 90s, when the Euro was getting set up. They were prepping the countries for a fixed exchange rate that would get morphed into the Euro; they started by keeping each currency within a certain range. Countries would be required to make fiscal and monetary policy changes in order to keep their currency within the window.
When the British pound started bumping up against the lower bound in 1992, they had the choice of jacking up interest rates, which would prop up the pound but trash the British economy. The Tory government of the time opted to bail on the Euro project rather that trash their economy.
Likewise, the current Tory-LibDem coalition is opting to distance themselves from the rest of the EU rather than get stuck with policies that would likely be in something other than the UK's best interest. The rest of the EU seems to be zeroed-in on keeping things together, while the UK thinks otherwise, since their love of independence and a more market-based economy is greater than their love of the EU experiment.
A similar dynamic is in play on climate change. The global conventional wisdom is to do some serious cuts in CO2, lest the sauna doors get propped open for good. Serious cuts in CO2 will constrain the freedoms and economic growth prospects in the Anglosphere, and the conservatives in the Anglosphere are starting to get that. The Canadian Conservatives were torn between being good global citizens and hanging onto the growth and freedom that freely using fossil fuels helps with; they've now opted to do the latter, now that they've locked in a majority that won't have to go to the polls for a while.
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