EU accused of ‘going soft’ on emission cuts

Date: 24/09/1998

By Simon Coss

CONCERN is growing that the EU may be shying away from its oft-stated commitment to set the pace in international efforts to tackle the problem of global warming.

Critics point to the lack of progress made at a ministerial-level meeting in Tokyo last week, recent statements by Environment Commissioner Ritt Bjerregaard and conclusions adopted by the European Parliament's environment committee as evidence of this change of stance.

“The European Union should be leading by example rather than by rhetoric,” complained Andrew Kerr of the World-wide Fund for Nature (WWF) after the Tokyo meeting. “The Europeans have a tendency to go soft at the critical moment. It is not just on issues such as Bosnia where this happens, but also on global warming.”

Kerr is particularly concerned that the Union no longer appears to be suggesting that any ceiling be imposed on the use of so-called 'flexible mechanisms' to achieve greenhouse gas emission cuts.

These mechanisms, which include the controversial and as yet untested practice of 'emissions trading' (buying the right to pollute from other countries), formed part of the deal on greenhouse gas reductions thrashed out at last December's international climate change talks in Kyoto, Japan.

They were included in the agreement at the insistence of the US, but environmental campaigners fear that Washington will use them to enable it to introduce very limited emission-reduction measures at home. Even with this clause, the Kyoto deal has yet to be ratified by an extremely hostile US Congress.

The signatories to the Kyoto agreement will meet again in Buenos Aires in November to try to work out how to implement it.

The European Commission insists the EU is still fully committed to the stance it took at Kyoto and argues that last week's meeting in Tokyo was anything but an anti-climax.

“We felt it was a positive meeting where people tried to move closer to each other's positions,” said Bjerregaard's spokesman Peter Jørgensen.

“We made much more progress than at the talks we had this time last year.”

But critics point to the fact that neither the conclusions of the Parliament's environment committee nor a recent speech by Bjerregaard to MEPs mentioned imposing limits on countries' use of flexible mechanisms to achieve their greenhouse gas cutting targets.

“If Europe says we are going to meet our emissions reductions by buying them somewhere else, what sort of impression does that give?” said Kerr.

In a statement issued after the Tokyo meeting, the Commission said the EU believed that emissions trading “must be supplemental to domestic efforts.”