EU pledges to lead climate change fight despite financial crisis

The French president warned EU leaders they will face ridicule if they renege on their low-carbon targets
David Gow
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday October 16 2008 18.11 BST

European Union leaders have reasserted their ambition to lead the world in fighting climate change despite the growing economic recession and mounting rifts among its 27 governments.
The French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who chaired the two-day meeting, warned EU leaders they would be held in ridicule if they abandoned their 18-month-old target of creating the world's first low-carbon economy.
In March 2007, a few months before the sub-prime crisis provoked financial turmoil, EU governments pledged to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, take 20% of primary energy from renewables and reduce energy consumption through efficiency by 20% – all by 2020.
But several heads of government, including Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and Poland's Donald Tusk, insisted during the fractious meeting that they were not in office then and threatened to refuse to be bound by the targets given the enveloping economic gloom.
Insisting, however, that he had achieved unanimity, Sarkozy said the two-day summit had stuck to its timetable of agreeing the climate change package before the end of the year. "I can confirm that the objectives remain unchanged and the calendar remains the same," he said.
He told journalists: "We cannot use the financial and economic crisis as a pretext for dropping it (the package)." José Manuel Barroso, EC president, added: "We're not going to let up in the battle against climate change and there's no question of picking between the financial crisis and climate change. The two go together."
Both Sarkozy and Barroso admitted they had "an awful lot of work" to do in persuading the 27 governments to agree on the fine details of the package by mid-December.
The foreign secretary, David Miliband, declared: "In a number of countries there's a bit of buyer's remorse over March 2007." Insisting there was no going back on the December deadline, he added: "There's going to be some hard talking over the next few weeks."
Eastern European countries, ex-communist states, want the richer nations in western Europe to carry more of the cost of cutting emissions and protection for their industries which are heavily dependent on fossil fuels, notably coal. Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia wanted at one point to scrap the December deadline.
Germany and others want their heavy energy-intensive industries such as steel to be given a greater number of free pollution permits under the EU's flagship emissions trading scheme, rather than having to pay for them.
Faced with a squeeze on their budgets as key economies move into recession and unemployment increases, most governments are worried by the sheer cost – amounting to tens of billions of euros – that the climate change package entails.
A final summit communiqué masked these problems by declaring that the 27 leaders would decide in December on "appropriate responses to the challenge of applying that package in a rigorously established cost-effective manner to all sectors of the European economy and all member states, having regard to each member state's specific situation."
Sarkozy gave a sign of encouragement to the European car industry, which has been fighting EC plans to cut carbon emissions from all new cars to 120g/km from 2012 and has asked for a €40bn (£31bn) bailout scheme to enable the shift to "green" technologies.
The French president pointed out that the US government had given its three leading car-makers – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – a $25bn (£15bn) soft loan to re-equip their plants to produce more fuel-efficient, less polluting cars.
Sarkozy insists that this puts the European industry at a competitive disadvantage. He said: "Can you ask the European car industry to produce clean cars, change the whole industrial apparatus within a few months, without giving them a helping hand?"