The political horse-trading that took place in Brussels prior to the European Council reaching agreement on the European Union's Climate and Energy Package for 2030 in the early hours of last Friday is a harbinger of things to come on the wider international stage. Various EU member states had to be looked after, in one way or another.
Ireland got a special deal that recognises the importance of agriculture to our economy, while Poland (which had threatened to use its veto) will end up getting a large chunk of some €35 billion in EU aid to modernise its energy sector, which is now heavily based on burning coal.
An overall EU-wide cut of “at least 40 per cent” in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 sounds impressive, which is the message the European Union’s leaders intended to convey. On closer examination, however, it is much less ambitious than what would be needed if the EU was to take action in line with the vast and still growing corpus of science that underpins climate change.
After all, emissions in Europe were already down by 20 per cent relative to 1990 levels in 2012, partly due to the recession but also to the efforts being made by many EU member states to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels by switching to renewables and using energy more efficiently.
The 27 per cent targets for renewables and energy efficiency are widely seen as inadequate because they are simply not high enough to persuade the international markets that Europe is really serious about making the quantum leap that is needed to achieve a net zero-carbon economy. In addition, for any of the targets to be realised, the EU must devise an equitable “burden-sharing” arrangement specifying what each member state will be expected to do in the decade after 2020 – as was done just six months after the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change was adopted in 1997. Without similar individual member-state targets, the latest EU package would be no more than a hollow shell.
After a relatively fruitless week of climate talks in Bonn, Europe will be able to go to the UN's Lima summit in December with the new package as its bargaining chip. What should help focus minds is the release next Sunday in Copenhagen of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's synthesis of its fifth assessment report. This is the most comprehensive scientific overview of how the world is warming and what needs to be done to deal with the challenges that rising temperatures will pose for humanity and the ecosystem over the next several decades.
Nobody other than persistent climate change deniers will then be able to say that we have not been well and truly warned of the consequences of failing to take decisive action.