Stepping up the fight against global warming

Date: 02/11/00

EU environment ministers will meet next week to prepare the ground for this month's international climate change conference in The Hague. Gareth Harding reports on the difficult balancing act they will have to perform if the Union is to stand any chance of fulfilling the pledges it made at Kyoto to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

ONE would have thought that torrential rain in western Europe and devastating droughts in eastern Africa might have steeled the minds of climate change negotiators as they prepare for a crucial conference in The Hague later this month.

But spiralling emissions of greenhouse gases, coupled with protracted squabbling about how to reverse the trend, have cast a cloud over the United Nations-sponsored talks.

The EU has set itself the target of stabilising carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at 1990 levels by this year and cutting emissions of six greenhouse gases by 8% before 2012.

Thanks largely to the 'dash for gas' in the UK and the closure of coal-burning plants in eastern Germany, the Union is likely to meet its first goal by a whisker. But recent projections show that unless radical action is taken, it will fall far short of the targets it signed up to at the 1997 Kyoto conference.

Launching the EU's climate change programme earlier this year, Environment Commissioner Margot Wallström admitted that the picture was "not rosy". Arguing that additional measures were needed at the European level, Wallström warned governments not to rely on the Union doing it all. "Most of them are not on track to reach their national targets," she said.

The European Environment Agency forecasts that, based on current trends, CO2 emissions in the EU will rise by 8% by 2010, due largely to soaring emissions in the transport sector. Union governments are well aware that CO2 emissions from cars and lorries threaten to blow a hole in their Kyoto commitments, but they seem neither willing nor able to take the hard choices needed to stem rampant traffic growth.

The recent wave of fuel protests across Europe has certainly not helped matters. For years, governments have been increasing duties on petrol in order to persuade motorists to leave their cars in the garage. The problem is that this money has not been ploughed back into providing better public transport, so it is little wonder that the patience of car and truck drivers finally snapped in September.

Nor is it any great surprise that governments capitulated to the great car-driving majority by offering sweeteners to those hardest hit by the fuel prices.

The nose-dive in the popularity of some leaders judged to have mishandled the petrol crisis may prove short-lived. But the consequences for the fight against global warming are dramatic.

Firstly, it has given green taxes a bad name. Lauded for a long time as the 'win-win' way to combat climate change, such duties are now seen by many as yet another mechanism for greedy finance ministers to line their coffers. Needless to say, this is hardly the way to persuade sceptical governments, such as Spain and Ireland, of the need for an EU-wide energy tax.

Secondly, say critics, caving in to the car lobby has sent completely the wrong message to motorists at a time when radical solutions are needed to tackle rising emissions from the transport sector.

If the fuel protests have proved one thing, it is that Union governments can no longer rely on fiscal measures to meet the bloc's Kyoto targets. So what else can they turn to?

The European Climate Change Programme (ECCP), which was launched with much fanfare in March, aims to give 'new impetus' to the EU's fight against global warming.

The Commission's programme advocates a twin-track strategy for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. The first 'pillar' lists a number of potential policies and measures, such as boosting the uptake of renewables and improving energy efficiency, which it hopes will help the Union meets its climate change goals. The second outlines how an emissions trading system might work in the future.

Most experts believe that, despite its flaws, the proposed trading scheme is an innovative way of cutting emissions at little cost to businesses or consumers. However, the raft of policies and measures proposed by the Commission has been attacked by MEPs and green groups for being less than ambitious, ill thought-out and over-reliant on flexible mechanisms.

The author of the European Parliament's report on the ECCP, Portuguese Christian Democrat Jorge Moreira da Silva, accused the Commission of producing a "strategically meaningless list of common and coordinated policies and measures". Lamenting the lack of sectoral targets in the programme, he concluded that the policy paper was "so vacuous that it is difficult to see why it has been submitted at all".

Green groups are also unimpressed with the document. Last month, a coalition of Europe's biggest environmental organisations calculated that the EU could save more than a billion tonnes of CO2 by adopting a set of measures already on the table. This is 200 million tonnes more than the reduction to which the Union pledged at Kyoto in 1997.

The groups, which include Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature and Climate Network Europe, remain suspicious of relying on forestry plantations (sinks) or voluntary agreements with industry to cut greenhouse gases. Instead they are urging EU governments to make their goal of doubling the share of renewables by 2010 legally binding. They have also called for laws to increase cogeneration's share of electricity consumption to 18% within the same timeframe.

But what incenses green groups most of all are the fossil-fuel and road-building subsidies which continue to be handed out by Union member states and institutions. Greenpeace has estimated that these amount to almost €10 billion a year, while even the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development believes that scrapping subsidies to polluting industries and activities could cut greenhouse gases by 13%.

Environment ministers meeting in Luxembourg last month also called on the Commission to propose measures aimed at abolishing fossil fuel subsidies and urged Wallström to draw up more concrete policies and measures than those proposed in the ECCP.

One of the aims of The Hague meeting from 13-24 November, known as COP-6 (see box opposite), is to adopt a set of common and coordinated policies and measures for combating climate change which all the industrialised states that have pledged to cut emissions (Annex 1 countries) can sign up to.

But the chances of this happening appear slim, due to the reluctance of the US and others to have their hands tied.

Frustration at American foot-dragging on the climate change issue has been simmering ever since Kyoto. But during a preparatory meeting for COP-6, the Union's anger with the US, Australia and other industrialised nations boiled over. In a thinly-veiled reference to Washington's stance, the Commission said that "the EU went out of its way to be constructive. However, the same cannot be said of some other leading industrialised countries, which stuck rigidly to well-known positions throughout."

There is general agreement among the Annex 1 countries that a tough compliance system is needed to make sure signatory countries stick to their word. But there is still a wide gulf between the EU - which believes that the bulk of greenhouse gas cuts should be achieved by domestic actions - and most other industrialised countries, which argue for unrestricted use of flexible mechanisms.

When it comes to relations with other Kyoto signatories, the Union will have to perform a difficult balancing act in The Hague. On the one hand, it is keen to push for strict rules on implementing the 1997 protocol. But on the other, it is wary of further antagonising politicians in the US who are already hesitant about abiding by

the commitments the Clinton administration signed up to in Kyoto.

Moreira believes the best way for the Union to maintain its leadership role in the climate change debate is to stop chastising other countries for not doing enough to combat global warming and prove to the rest of the world that it is able to meet its own targets.

"There is little point in criticising the attitude of the United States if what we are proposing continues to be so greatly at variance with what we do," says the MEP.

EU environment ministers are due to meet to prepare the ground for the forthcoming international climate change conference in The Hague. They will have to perform a difficult balancing act if the Union is to stand any chance of fulfilling the pledges it made at Kyoto to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.