The European Union will stick with its lowest offer for cutting carbon emissions under a UN climate accord, fulfilling the wishes of industry, a draft letter shows.

The 27-nation bloc has committed to unilaterally cutting carbon dioxide to 20 percent below 1990 levels over the next decade.

The EU will keep open its offer to deepen those cuts to 30 percent if other rich countries make similar efforts, according to the letter, seen by Reuters, to top UN climate official Yvo de Boer.

The UN's global climate talks in Copenhagen in December ended with a weak accord and no such comparable offers however.

Experts say the total cuts offered there by rich countries amount to no more than 18 percent and fall far short of the 25-40 percent that UN scientists outline as necessary to avert dangerous climate change.

The world is currently on track for temperatures to rise to 3.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century, which would bring catastrophic melting of ice-sheets and rising seas, scientists say. But many EU countries and industries are wary of increasing cuts to 30 percent alone because the cost of cutting pollution might put factories at a disadvantage to rivals in other countries.

"After the Copenhagen failure, the EU would be foolish to again unilaterally increase its greenhouse gas objective," Gordon Moffat, the head of steel industry group Eurofer, said in a statement on Thursday. "Another 10 percent would be fatal."

But environmentalists say the EU is naive to think its conditional 30 percent offer creates any negotiating leverage and the bloc should move there anyway to set a moral example.

"Tackling climate negotiations with the same strategy as trade negotiations will simply get them bogged down like the current Doha round of trade talks," Greenpeace campaigner Joris den Blanken said.

Spain, which holds the EU's rotating presidency until July and drafted the letter, will wait for feedback from all 27 EU nations before signing and sending it next week.

At a meeting of EU ambassadors in Brussels on Thursday, a group of eastern European countries led by Poland joined Italy, Cyprus and Malta to call for the deletion of any reference to the 30 percent offer, diplomats said.

Britain, Denmark, France and the Netherlands wanted the 30 percent offer to be prominent but to remain conditional.

Source: China Daily
2010-1-25