According to Der Spiegel, when Barack Obama made his Berlin speech last July, the following line “drew the greatest applause of any other sentence he delivered in his speech:”

Let us resolve that all nations, including my own, will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere.

It turns out that Germany is not feeling quite as serious about that purpose after all. Today, the EU “instantly rebuffed” requests from European automakers for a 40 billion euro loan aimed at developing greener cars that would reduce CO2 emissions by 18 percent by 2012.

This next part in particular should come as a surprise to Obama:

Auto-making nations led by Germany, which specializes in powerful, heavy luxury vehicles such as Mercedes and BMW, which emit the most greenhouse gases, have pressed for a softening of [the emission-reduction plan’s] terms.

Meanwhile, back in arrogant and rapacious America, George W. Bush agreed to a $25 billion loan to U.S. automakers that requires them to improve fuel efficiency by 40 percent by 2020.

I guess when Barack Obama told us, “We can’t drive our SUVs . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” he meant they wouldn’t say okay unless they were leading the way in big dirty cars. As someone who thinks the whole CO2 panic is absurd, I’d like to second Obama’s pledge. Let us please act with the same level of commitment to emissions reduction as Germany!