Climate heating up EU talks

EUROPE, which hopes to be a model for the world at UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December, is currently squabbling internally over who cuts what and who pays for it. On paper the EU nations' commitment is good; agreeing last December to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent overall by 2020, and by 30 per cent if the rest of the world agrees in Copenhagen. But when you're trying to prevent the world from heating up catastrophically the devil is in the detail, and there's just three months to Copenhagen.

A recent Franco-German initiative of brandishing the threat of a carbon tax at Europe's borders for products made in countries not doing enough to tackle global warming is a case in point.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel "are warning our partners of the consequences of a stalemate" in Europe, because the Chinese, the Russians and the Indians are going to hard enough to convince anyway, one of the French strategists said. The two leaders wrote to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon arguing that states that fail to back a deal at the Copenhagen talks should be held accountable.

However many others in Europe are opposed to this kind of heavy negotiating strategy. "The Swedish (EU) presidency is totally against it, the European Commission is against, the Danish (hosts in Copenhagen) are against, the British and the Dutch are against, the WTO is against," on European official said, firing off a non-exhaustive list. Even in Germany there is no unanimity on the protectionist approach. "The European Union should not mess around too much with threats," Belgian Energy Minister Paul Magnette told local paper Le Soir, summing up the mood.

The other argument beginning to heat up in Europe is the question of national pollution quotas. The European Commission took a legal hit last week when a top European court annulled its attempt to limit the amount of greenhouse gases that Estonia and Poland can let heavy industry emit. That decision sets a precedent that could see other countries seek to raise their emission caps and upset the EU's emissions trading scheme, a key plank in Europe's plans for tackling climate change. The court ruled, that in the cases of Estonia and Poland, the commission had overstepped its authority by rejecting the plans based only on doubts it had about how the countries collected their data.

So far the commission is standing firm, at least as firm as it can. EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas issued a statement Thursday seeking to put a lid on events by preventing Warsaw and Tallinn from issuing extra carbon permits to their industries while the matter was still being addressed. He also suggested that a reevaluation was unlikely to lead to any major change in carbon allowances handed out.

The debate within Europe will be relaunched at the next meeting of EU environment ministers in Luxembourg on October 21, when the subject looks likely to overwhelm the rest of the agenda. One of those points is the amount of financial aid poorer nations will need annually to tackle and cope with climate change, a figure somewhere between €2-15 billion ($4.2-31.5 billion).

Fixing that total and then dividing it up between EU nations will also not be a simple task wither. Another of the key issues on that agenda is how to get the rest of the world to commit to more coordinated action in Copenhagen. The world will be looking at Europe to get its green house in order first.

AFP