Another false EU summit
BILL JAMIESON
business.scotsman.com
MAKE no mistake. This EU summit is a milestone. It "marks a sea change in Euro-pean thinking"... provides "new impetus"... "an ambitious agenda..." "the route to solving Europe's problem..."
No, not last week's epochal summit setting binding targets on renewable energy and cutting carbon dioxide emissions, championed by no less than Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, but the epochal EU summit in Lisbon in 2000. This was to create, I quote, "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world" by 2010. The champion of Lisbon was no less than... Jose Manuel Barroso.
A reminder of Lisbon is due, and for these reasons. It has still, on its own lofty declaration, three years still to run. Europe's competitiveness and economic performance, while having improved a little, give no cause whatever for complacency. Unemployment across the G7 averages 5.4%, while in Germany it stands at 7.9% and in France 8.5%. EU summit declarations are one thing. Achievement is quite another.
Most important of all, we should be aware of the dramatic volte face now underway in Brussels as one set of priorities is swept off the table to make way for another, altogether more contemporary and fashionable - if utterly contradictory.
So important was the Lisbon Agenda to the future of Europe that its manifesto was re-launched in 2005, initial efforts having failed miserably and in many European countries the economic outlook had got worse. Rather than, as envisaged at Lisbon, the creation of 20 million new jobs and the achievement of an economic growth rate of 3% a year, in France and Germany unemployment remained stubbornly high.
Few would quibble with the laudable aims of last week's EU 'Green Summit'. The world would be a decidedly more pleasant place were we to cut our dependence on fossil fuels and reduce pollution. But such lofty declarations are little more than wasted hot air unless the specific targets and policies - the rungs on the ladder to achievement - are realistic and do not jeopardise the existing priorities that the EU has devoted serious resource to fulfil.
It is here that the Green Summit has already come under challenge. Last week, EU leaders, under the chairmanship of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, agreed binding measures to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by the year 2020. Member states have also agreed to set a 10% minimum target on the use of bio fuels in transport by 2020.
Ambitious? Don't doubt it. From car engine sizes to the compulsory adoption of low energy light bulbs, it envisages a sweeping change in lifestyles. Barroso declared in Brussels that "these decisions are very important for the future of our planet, for the future generations, for the global community". And said Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair: "These are a set of groundbreaking, bold, ambitious targets for the European Union. It gives Europe a clear leadership position on this crucial issue facing the world."
He will not, however, be around to implement these measures.
It goes almost without saying that France negotiated a special clause to itself about the importance of nuclear energy - a topic that deeply splits the environmentalist lobby. President Jacques Chirac insisted that he would only agree to binding energy targets if nuclear power was included and proposed that 45% of the mix come from non-fossil fuel sources. France gets 80% of its power from nuclear power plants.
But the Green Summit has already encountered some dissent. Of particular concern has been the dramatic switch from Barroso the champion of business to Barroso the Green Tsar, with a stream of climate change initiatives - many of them legally binding - now pouring forth from the European Commission. From Gunter Verheugen, the EU's industry commissioner, has come an accusation that "climate hysteria" has now gripped Brussels. "Two years it was all 'jobs, jobs. jobs'. Now it's 'climate, climate, climate.'"
What irks many of Europe's business leaders is that Barroso's earlier insistence on putting business first has been swept aside. The target to cut car emissions to 130 grams per kilometre - the toughest standard in the world - was agreed before a full assessment was made the impact on Europe's car industry. The worry is that European industry, particularly energy intensive companies, will simply move to India and China. Investment in European plants is already falling.
In an east-west split between new and old members, Poland and the Czech Republic were said to be at loggerheads with Germany, Britain and Italy. Those three countries led the push for a binding agreement that 20% of all Europe's energy should come from renewable sources by 2020.
Mirek Topolanek, the Czech prime minister, has described the targets as "unreasonable, nonsensical", and other EU government leaders argue that this summit is another example of the EU making promises it cannot keep. He also took a sideswipe at the dictatorial way in which binding long term targets were being declared. "We have grown up since the days of communism when we were given five year plans," he said. "We don't want to go back to that situation."
Ernest Antoine Seilliere, head of the Business Europe employers group, warned that the plans were uncosted, reliant on unproven technology and could force up power costs to industry.
And many would like to see the EU bureaucracy and its senior officials set an example by adopting energy-saving measures themselves. It was piquant that the declaration last Friday sparked some fun-poking at Barroso and his four wheel drive VW. Barroso dismissed such criticism as "over-zealous moralism".
To be fair, most commissioners drive cars that pollute at above-average levels. And British Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson has opted for a fuel-thirsty Jaguar.
The more serious criticism, however, is that the EU's planned reduction in emissions, inspired in large part by the Stern Report, should impose huge costs on current populations long before the benefits, if any, from emission reductions appear. And there is still such dispute about climate change that projections in the Stern paper for 100 years hence are just not credible. Those from the International Panel on Climate Change were based on economic modelling, with assumptions on economic growth and related emissions, which some leading economists claim to be deeply flawed. The worry looking forward is that last week's EU war on climate change will prove no more successful than the great Lisbon Summit on economic change launched seven years ago and now R.I.P.
This article: business.scotsman.com
Last updated: 11-Mar-07 00:59 GMT
==================================================
Comments Add your comment:-
1. MarkB, USA / 3:27am 11 Mar 2007 Another Dog Bites Man story. Europeans make grand gestures, and then go about their dirty business. The German automotive manufacturers have already strangled Angela Merkel's enviro-baby in the cradle, yet she goes on bleeding green for public consumption. Wasn't Kyoto the same? Britain and Germany cooked the books by back-dating their energy use promises to the time when, respectively, old British coal-fired plants and East German factories were being closed in any case. And that carbon-trading scheme? Each government fixed their own previous carbon output at artificially high, so that they could fly under the new limits without cost. How do you know a Euro-polititian is lying about cutting carbon output? His/her mouth is moving. And there's a finger pointed at Bush. |
