CLIMATE CHANGE: Europe Stepping Back

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Mar 14 2008 (IPS) - A year after the European Union’s governments promised to take the lead in fighting climate change, they appeared to back-pedal on that pledge at a summit in Brussels Mar. 13-14.

Whereas a traditional spring meeting of the EU’s presidents and prime ministers during 2007 had an air of urgency about it, the most pressing concern on the minds of many leaders attending the same event 12 months later was how to ensure that environmental measures do not hurt those sectors of Europe’s industry that guzzle the highest quantities of energy.

True, this week’s summit did endorse the first paper drafted by Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, that dealt with climate change as an issue of international security. Solana warned that global warming carries great potential for conflict between Russia and its western neighbours over energy resources, especially those in the Arctic.

Yet, rather than seizing on this warning in order to intensify their efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the EU leaders spent much time addressing a phenomenon known as ‘carbon leakage’. That term is used to describe fears that energy-intensive industries could relocate from Europe to countries in the wider world with less stringent laws that aim to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the main gas triggering climate change.

Leaders agreed in particular that special efforts would be made to take into account the situation facing industries heavily reliant on energy when the EU’s emissions trading system (ETS) is revamped.

In January, the European Commission proposed to broaden the ETS, under which permits for discharging carbon dioxide are awarded. Although permits are frequently issued free of charge at the moment, the Commission recommended that from 2013 they should increasingly be auctioned.

A number of EU governments – including that of the Union’s most populous country, Germany – insisted this week that large energy consuming industries like steel, aluminium, paper and cement should not have to buy carbon credits by auction.

José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, said that the best way forward would be for rules applying to such industries to be included in an international agreement. He was referring to talks held under the auspices of the United Nations aimed at thrashing out a successor to the Kyoto protocol, the key international accord on climate change. Such talks are scheduled to wind up at a conference in Copenhagen next year.

Nonetheless, Barroso stated that the question of ‘carbon leakage’ would have to be grappled with in the new law covering the ETS. Contingency planning is necessary, he suggested, in case international rules on the surrounding issues cannot be established.

Earlier in the week Barroso contended that EU governments would have “zero credibility” if they began to unravel commitments they had made last year to reduce the bloc’s collective greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

He was more sanguine on the summit’s final day, expressing satisfaction at how governments had supported the main thrust of a package of measures recommended by the Commission.

Environmentalists and anti-poverty activists were not so impressed.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) was disappointed that EU leaders did not undertake to go beyond commitments made a year earlier. WWF believes that the governments should have set a target of reducing emissions by 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 – 10 percent more than was agreed. So far the EU has said it would only accept the 30 percent goal if other major industrialised countries will also strive for it. According to green groups, the EU should lead by example, rather than making its environmental policies conditional on action taken by others.

“European leaders continue to focus on the dinosaurs in the energy-intensive industry, rather than on the potential for innovation, jobs and export opportunities that measures to reverse climate change could create,” said WWF campaigner Stephan Singer. “They run the risk of missing the big picture of the huge costs Europe and humanity will have to face if no serious action is taken now.”

Oxfam emphasised how poor countries will bear the brunt of climate change, through such consequences as declining yields from rain-fed agriculture.

“The EU has demonstrated leadership today, but given that poor people are already suffering disproportionately from the effects of climate change, member states should be more ambitious and act more quickly,” said Oxfam spokesman Phil Bloomer. “They must aim to cut their carbon emissions by at least 30 percent and stand up to the industry lobby that is already attempting to water down the EU’s target. Only then will we truly begin to tackle climate change and safeguard a future for the world’s poorest people.”

The most contentious commitment made by EU leaders last year was that biofuels would provide 10 percent of the energy needed to power cars and other modes of transport by 2020.

This target has attracted a chorus of criticism since then. Recently, the World Food Programme stated that governments should reconsider their promotion of biofuels. Josette Sheeran, the WFP’s director, held the use of agricultural land for growing biofuels as partly responsible for rising food prices, which, she said, is fuelling a “new hunger” across the planet.

Such complaints notwithstanding, a senior EU figure this week reiterated her support for biofuels, suggesting they will prove vital in reducing the Union’s dependence on imported oil and gas. “Biofuels are an insurance policy against future energy supply problems,” said Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU’s commissioner for agriculture. “Our transport sector’s dependence on imported oil is 98 percent. So many of us will have quite a problem getting to the office if the taps are turned off one day.”

Fischer Boel was speaking at the World Biofuels Markets Congress in Brussels, a gathering for biotechnology and other companies keen on seeing higher amounts of biofuels used in Europe.

The event attracted a protest by green and social activists, who cited scientific studies concluding that the production of biofuels can contribute significantly to climate change, especially if forests are cleared in the process.

“Massive expansion, reaching into many millions of hectares, of monoculture plantations will cause further damage to biodiversity, human rights and livelihoods”, said Remy de Boer, spokesman for an action group called Agrofools. “Agrofuels will exacerbate climate change and will certainly not help to combat it. It is immoral to keep promoting the use of agrofuels like the World Biofuels Market does.”