Saving the planet comes down to earth

Date: 18/03/1999

By Simon Coss

IN THEORY, Europe should be greener today than ever before. The EU currently has a total of 11 ministers from Green parties in its 15 national governments. In four member states - Germany, France, Italy and Finland - environment ministries are in ecologist hands, giving the green movement a powerful 33 votes in the Union's Council of Environment Ministers.

But the expected ecological revolution which should have resulted from the hold these green hands now have on the Union's levers of power has quite patently not arrived.

In France, Environment Minister Dominique Voynet has had to grit her teeth and support a government which has made it clear it will continue to rely on nuclear energy as its main source of power. Italy was recently granted extra time to comply with the Union's new 'Auto-Oil' air pollution rules and in Germany, the spats between members of the country's new red-green coalition have been headline news for months.

What all these green politicians have been learning the hard way is the truth of the old political maxim that it is a great deal easier to criticise from the sidelines than to be the one taking the tough political decisions.

This point was made only too clearly by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer during this month's congress of European Green Parties in Paris when he admitted “the passage from a party of protest to a party of government was anything but easy”. His sentiments were echoed by Finland's Green Environment Minister Pekka Haavisto What these politicians have also discovered is that behind the communautaire rhetoric routinely spouted by the Union's more media-savvy politicians, EU politics is still essentially about 15 governments squabbling to get the best deal for themselves.

This dose of realpolitik has proved particularly hard for the ecological movement - by its nature a transnational grouping - to swallow. In recent months, for example, Voynet has been forced to back her government's criticisms of her Green German counterpart Jürgen Trittin over Germany's threat to abandon nuclear reprocessing contracts with French firm Cogema.

But while a 'new Green dawn' has not yet broken, the EU has made some faltering steps towards a more environmentally aware attitude to policy-making in recent years.

Environment Commissioner, Denmark's Ritt Bjerregaard, decided to take what amounts to a 'macro' approach to environmental policy. She has opted to propose a number of large framework directives designed to set out broad-brush strategies for tackling the Union's major environmental problems - including water pollution, air quality and rubbish disposal - in an ecologically sound manner.

Within these frameworks, Bjerregaard has then either proposed rules to deal with specific problems or called on governments to adapt the basic legislation to local needs.

The success of this approach has been mixed. On air quality, a series of tough new regulations to limit harmful emissions from cars and small trucks (the Auto-Oil rules) were agreed last summer by EU governments and the European Parliament. These oblige all the Union's member states to phase out the use of leaded petrol by 2000, among other things.

On water quality, the Danish environment supremo has been less successful. Her plans for a framework water directive are still bogged down in tortuous negotiations between the Parliament and Council of Ministers, and are unlikely to be finally agreed upon until next spring.

She has also found out the hard way that EU governments do not always obey existing Union regulations on water quality. At one point last year, Bjerregaard's officials were chasing up 13 of the Union's 15 governments over failure to respect the Union's laws on nitrate pollution.

In addition to these problems, Bjerregaard's attempts to 'green' the Union have not always been welcomed with open arms by her fellow Commissioners.

Industry Commissioner Martin Bange-mann and farm supremo Franz Fischler have both complained that her plans often seem to hit their respective sectors particularly hard.

Trade Commissioner Sir Leon Brittan has also repeatedly warned Bjerregaard that any legislation she proposes must comply with World Trade Organisation rules and should not, above all, upset the Americans.

Concern over trade relations is one of the main reasons why the European Commission and EU governments have not called for a temporary freeze on the approval and marketing of crops containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Public opinion in most member states now seems overwhelmingly in favour of a moratorium to allow more time for research into the long-term effects of these new strains on both humans and the environment.

In addition to this, EU governments and the Parliament are currently in the process of updating the 1990 directive (90/220) which sets out the procedures for approving new GMO strains - so now might seem the obvious time to call 'time out'. However, at their meeting in December, EU environment ministers categorically ruled out any suggestion of a Europe-wide temporary ban.

At present, the vast majority of GM produce consumed in Europe is imported from the US and as one EU diplomat put it recently, “a moratorium on GM products would make the current dispute over bananas look like a storm in a tea cup”.

International considerations have also come into play in deliberations on Bjerregaard's pet subject - climate change.

The Danish Commissioner was extremely bullish ahead of the international negotiations on ways to tackle the problem of global warming held in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997. She was particularly tough on Washington, accusing the US of trying to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 'buying the right to pollute' from countries in industrial decline such as Russia rather than making significant efforts at home.

After Kyoto, she returned to Europe saying she had won a considerable victory for the environment. It was then that the real problems began. First of all, EU governments began squabbling amongst themselves about who would have to make what cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to enable the Union to meet the overall commitments it had made in Japan. That issue was only resolved after a particularly bad-tempered all-night meeting of environment ministers.

But then came the far more difficult question of Washington. For the Kyoto deal to work, the US - the world's largest single producer of greenhouse gases - must remain on board. With this in mind, Bjerregaard's comments on the US and climate change over the past 16 months have been rather more conciliatory than her fiery condemnations ahead of Kyoto.

In essence, she has had to wrestle with the conundrum which faces all green policy-makers: how do you draw up international rules to tackle a problem which takes no account of national borders in a politically divided world?