The European Union’s vote last month to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent isn’t just meant to be an isolated action, but rather it’s aimed at persuading other nations to move ahead with efforts to fight global warming, the region’s top environmental official said.
“We need the cooperation of all the countries,” European Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said in a March 27 interview in Brussels. “Up to now the discussion really was who would go ahead first, and everybody was expecting somebody else to make the first step. We are doing this.”
The 27-nation bloc agreed March 9 to unilaterally reduce the gases by 20 percent, and it proposed a 30-percent cut if developed nations followed suit. The effort is in addition to existing commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 treaty to curb emissions from burning fossils fuels such as oil and coal that are believed to contribute to global warming.
Without the cooperation of other countries, “we can reduce in the E.U. by 60 or 80 or, for that matter, 100 percent, and it will still not help the globe enough,” Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s environment minister, said in an interview broadcast Wednesday on Bloomberg Television.
The United States rejected Kyoto in 2001, saying it would damage competitiveness with large developing countries that weren’t given targets, and environmentalists say President George W. Bush isn’t likely to sign any new emissions agreement. Dimas recently criticized what he termed the “negative attitude” of the United States in international talks on climate change.
“We’re constructively engaged” in the fight against global warming, C. Boyden Gray, the U.S. ambassador to the E.U., said in an interview. Dimas’s comment “reflects frustration not just with us, but I think frustration with China and India who are not engaged,” he said.
China, set to overtake the U.S. as the biggest emitter by 2009, and India have both indicated that industrialized countries, which are responsible for most of the emissions since the industrial revolution, must take the lead in cutting gases.
Developing countries shouldn’t have to agree to targets when their focus is on improving living conditions, said Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations group that is stewarding talks on a post-Kyoto pact.
“I don’t think you could realistically expect them to reduce their emissions, because they have other priorities like economic growth and poverty eradication,” said de Boer, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, in an interview. “It would be very encouraging if we could find ways that provide them with incentives to limit the growth of their emissions.”
One solution would be to encourage the developing nations to adopt their own limits, with rewards for meeting them, de Boer said. Gray said that the United States is developing clean technologies that India and China must be encouraged to use in order to reduce their emissions.
Reducing the amount of gases emitted into the atmosphere lies at the center of efforts to control global warming, which the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Feb. 2 said is “very likely” caused by humans. Temperatures have risen by 0.76 degrees Celsius (1.37 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 19th century, and will increase another 1.1 degrees to 6.4 degrees by 2100, depending on emissions, the panel said.
Global warming is causing storms to intensify, sea levels to rise and patterns of rainfall and diseases to change, according to the panel’s scientists. The IPCC was scheduled to release a second report last Friday with regional observations and predictions of the effects of a warmer climate.
Under Kyoto, 35 nations and the E.U., made up of 15 countries at the time, committed to a goal of reducing emissions by a combined 5 percent from 1990 levels. Companies that cut beyond their targets can sell carbon credits to those unable to meet them, or invest in clean-energy projects that slash emissions in developing countries.
Kyoto’s provisions expire in 2012, and the E.U. wants a new pact in place by 2009.
With reporting by Chris Burns in Berlin and Francine Lacqua in London.
