Thursday

28th Mar 2024

EU and Australia trade insults over climate change

The European Union and Australia have started a war of words over climate change, with Canberra calling on Brussels to live up to its own global warming promises before lecturing others.

"You've got the spokesman for a group of countries lecturing us about not having signed Kyoto, yet the great bulk of the countries on whose behalf he speaks are falling well behind their Kyoto targets and are doing less well than Australia in meeting them," Australia's prime minister John Howard said on Monday (2 April), reacting to critical comments made by EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas the same day.

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Speaking at the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change in Brussels, Mr Dimas had lashed out at Australia and the US for being reluctant to sign up to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a climate change pact aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

"It's only political pride, if I can put it in a nice way, that prevents you [Australia] from ratifying," the EU commissioner said to Australian delegates, according to Reuters.

"If you would like to really give a boost to international negotiations, you could ratify Kyoto," he added, referring to the EU's ambition to see the industrialized world curb CO2 emissions by 30 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels.

But according to the Australian leader, 12 EU countries are likely to miss their Kyoto targets with the critical spotlight focusing on Portugal, Denmark, Ireland, Spain and Italy.

"Our answer to the spokesman for the European Union is look to your own affairs, get your countries complying with the targets you've proclaimed," Mr Howard said, stressing any binding targets would harm Australia's economy, which relies on its position as the world's second largest coal exporter.

The EU's own problems

The EU has itself admitted it lags behind its commitments, as figures cited by UK media show that Europe's carbon trading scheme is failing to curb emissions.

According to the data - related to Europe's big polluters in 22 countries, responsible for almost 93 percent of emissions in 2005 - the overall amount of greenhouse gas emissions went up by 1 to 1.5 percent in 2006.

The statistics suggest the EU is still too being generous and allocates too many carbon permits to enable the system to work properly.

"Without the proper caps we simply don't have an increase in carbon prices to bring an incentive to boost investment, environment spokesman for the Liberal Democrats in the European Parliament Chris Davies said, UK daily the Independent reports.

"Its [the EU emissions trading scheme] future depends on ensuring the cap is tight but at the moment it is more like a sieve than a barrier," he added.

Brussels expects the scheme to prove effective during its second phase of life from 2008-12, having recently taken a tougher line with member states and tightened the screw on 15 out of the 18 proposed future quotas so far.

Only France, Slovenia and the UK have been allowed to continue with the quotas of carbon emissions permits that they proposed in the first place for the period to 2012.

The carbon trading scheme is supposed to work by forcing CO2-heavy industry to invest in clean technology or buy carbon credits from CO2-light competitors to comply with targets, in a move that tries to get markets to tackle the climate issue directly.

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