Europe Bypassed on Climate Summit

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Ben benieuwd wat de inbreng van de nieuwe president Van Rompuy zal zijn.

Aangezien ook Arcelor Mittal en Shell er in gemoeid zijn door de positie
die ze claimen, speelt op de achtergrond ook Goldman Sachs een grote
(maar niet openbare) rol ;)

Groet / Cees

PS. Welke hedges zou GS afgesloten hebben?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/science/earth/02iht-euclimate.html
December 2, 2009
Europe Bypassed on Climate Summit
By JAMES KANTER
BRUSSELS — No political entity has pushed harder for the Copenhagen
conference on climate change to succeed than the European Union.

But just days before the opening of the United Nations-sponsored
meeting, the Europeans have been largely pushed to the sidelines,
watching as the world's two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, China
and the United States, seek to set the rules of the game.

“That’s of course the unfortunate situation for Copenhagen,” said Jo
Leinen, a German member of the European Parliament who is leading the
chamber’s delegation to the conference that is intended to follow up on
the soon-to-expire Kyoto Protocol. “It’s turning into a bit of a
ping-pong match between China and the United States, with each just
looking at the other,” he said.

Europeans say they have gone further than anybody else in moving toward
a low-carbon economy that could serve as a model for the rest of the
world. But the bloc’s ability to exercise global influence through
progressive standards and moral leadership, rather than through
superpower status, is facing a key test.

“The E.U. frankly doesn’t have the political clout to determine the
outcome at Copenhagen,” said Peter Haas, a professor of political
science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The E.U. still has much at stake in Copenhagen, however. It is facing
huge pressure, Mr. Haas added, to “keep the prospects of a global deal
alive so that European business leaders and voters believe they are on
track to take advantage of green technology markets of the future.”

That will be a challenge. The E.U. remains internally divided on key
issues, among them how much to pay developing countries to limit
emissions and how deeply to cut their own output.

European negotiators are also frequently at odds with their counterparts
in the United States, who have bitterly criticized the legally binding
structure created at Kyoto as cumbersome, unworkable and a threat to
American sovereignty.

The E.U. made global climate control a key plank of its geopolitical
strategy in 2001 when President George W. Bush said he would let the
Kyoto Protocol languish rather than seek, against impossible odds, to
win ratification in the U.S. Senate.

In a pivotal move, the E.U. supported a bid by Russia to join the World
Trade Organization. Vladimir Putin, as Russian president, reciprocated
by supporting Kyoto, giving it broad enough backing to take effect
anyway.

The United States snubbed Kyoto because fast-emerging China and India
could grow without facing restrictions on their emissions. But the E.U.
sped ahead anyway, developing a plethora of new targets, subsidies and
mechanisms to comply with the treaty, including a complicated system to
cap carbon dioxide and to trade emissions permits.

Almost overnight, London’s financial district became a global hub for
trading in greenhouse gases. Makers of windmills in Denmark flourished.
Innovative solar industries sprang up in Germany and Spain.

But the bloc’s most important employers — utilities, car makers and
steel and chemical companies — bitterly attacked important aspects of
the policy on the ground that it was jeopardizing Europe’s industrial
competitiveness.

ArcelorMittal, a giant steelmaker, and Royal Dutch Shell, the oil and
gas group, are among companies that have threatened to slow down
investment inside the 27-nation bloc unless the rest of the
industrialized world, and the United States in particular, adopt similar
carbon-capping systems.

So far, New Zealand is the only country outside Europe to have passed
into law a national plan to trade emissions, leaving the bloc looking
increasingly isolated. Jürgen R. Thumann, the president of
BusinessEurope, a powerful confederation of industry and employer
groups, has criticized the system as the most “costly climate policy
program in the world.”

Last year, in a bold move to stamp its environmental policies on the
rest of the world, the E.U. required all airlines arriving or leaving
from its airports to buy some pollution credits beginning in 2012. But
the move infuriated Washington, which said it risked breaking
international aviation rules by forcing non-European airlines into the
system.

Mistrust between Europe and the United States lingers even after
President Barack Obama pledged right after his election victory that the
United States would finally tackle greenhouse gases.

This summer, the Europeans were particularly irked by a U.S. decision to
negotiate with China bilaterally rather than to come to Bonn, where
climate talks under the U.N. umbrella were under way at the same time.
The Europeans regard the United Nations as the best forum to ensure
developing countries rally behind the treaty-making process.

In October, E.U. leaders agreed to pay a share into a global fund that
would be worth $100 billion annually by 2020. E.U. nations could not
agree on how much should be contributed from the public purse, bitterly
disappointing environmental campaigners and U.N. officials.

But the move marked the first formal recognition that rich countries
responsible for the vast majority of accumulated greenhouse gases will
need to pick up the bill to help poor countries adapt to the effects of
climate change. To help raise that money, the E.U. wants to reach a
political deal at Copenhagen that would bring about rich world
participation in a global carbon trading system, drawing on elements
from the European system.

When President Obama omitted any mention of money for developing
countries last week, the European Commission tartly responded that
finance was “one element we need to continue to discuss.”

Brussels also has taken a lukewarm view of Mr. Obama’s provisional
commitment to reduce U.S. emissions by 17 percent by 2020 compared to
2005 levels, which it views as falling far short of what is needed to
secure a global agreement to prevent the Earth’s temperature from rising
too much.

Todd Stern, the chief American climate negotiator, noted several months
ago that some people “across the pond” did not fully understand how
difficult it was to move the U.S. Congress to approve economy-wide
greenhouse gas measures.

In an interview Monday, Mr. Stern said his counterparts in Europe had
gained a more sophisticated understanding of the limitations and
frustrations of the American system through the process of negotiating
over the climate treaty.

E.U. officials also expressed disappointment in a Chinese offer, made
last week, to slow emissions growth, saying that it did not appear to go
beyond “business as usual.”

Despite the setbacks, E.U. officials maintain that their first-mover
strategy encouraged Brazil, Russia, Japan, Indonesia and South Korea to
make more ambitious bids than they would have done otherwise ahead of
the Copenhagen meeting.

The bloc’s environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, has called for
Europe to keep up that momentum by unilaterally cutting emissions by 30
percent from 1990 levels, from the current agreed offer of 20 percent,
rather than wait for other nations to sweeten their bids.

“The moral pressure would be much stronger on the developed countries
and developing countries alike,” Mr. Dimas said.

According to diplomats, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Slovenia
are among member states that would support cutting emissions further at
an E.U. summit in Brussels on Dec. 10 and Dec. 11, which will take place
during the first week of the Copenhagen conference. They see it as a way
to improve the chances of producing a treaty to replace Kyoto before it
expires in 2012.

But leaders in Italy and Poland, which has a big coal mining industry,
plus a number of East European countries, fear that such a step would be
far too expensive. That has created the potential for an embarrassing
public dispute among E.U. nations right when the bloc most hopes to
assert its leadership.

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