When you feel unwell, who do you consult? Your doctor, who has been trained to treat you? Or your boss, who hasn’t?
In a letter published by the British Medical Journal last month, numerous health professionals called for robust EU action against climate change. A 30% reduction in the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 (when compared to 1990 levels) would save more than 80 billion euros per year, the professionals said. These savings would result from both a fall in the numbers of people suffering from cardiac and respiratory diseases and from the increased productivity rate of a healthier workforce.
While this would appear to be a far more sensible way to slash medical bills than through austerity, policy-makers are refusing to follow the advice. Rather than going to the doctor, they take their prescriptions from corporate interest groups.
BusinessEurope, one of the most influential organisations in Brussels, has prepared a concise two-page briefing ahead of this week’s climate change negotiations in Durban. Its core messages are firstly that the Union should not go beyond its existing target of cutting emissions by 20% over the 1990 to 2020 period. And secondly, it warns that many companies will quit the EU if it unilaterally sets more ambitious reduction goals than the rest of the world.
Privileged access
Nick Campbell, the chairman of BusinessEurope’s committee on climate change, enjoys privileged access to the European Commission. A report by Carbon Trade Watch and the Corporate Europe Observatory has documented how he held discussions with EU officials preparing a “roadmap” for moving to a low-carbon economy in March this year. Campbell was exercised by proposals contained in a draft of that plan relating to the EU’s emissions trading system, under which firms buy and sell permits to pollute. Because many energy-intensive industries had been granted a surfeit of emission allowances in the past, the Commission’s draft recommended that 500 to 800 million should be set aside from phase three of the system (running from 2013 to 2020). After Campbell objected to that figure, it was deleted and the final version of the “roadmap” contained only a woolly commitment to “consider” the notion of setting allowances aside.
Campbell is a busy chap. He is also a lobbyist for the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC). As chemicals account for one-third of all industrial energy use in the Union, CEFIC should theoretically benefit from a shift towards electricity generation from renewable sources as they are less hazardous than coal, oil and nuclear power. Yet because the council’s members include fossil fuel addicts such as Shell, BP and Total, it is resisting saner energy policies. Giorgio Squinzi, the council’s president, recently contended that the EU’s 20% target was adequate. “Targeting greater C02 [carbon dioxide] reductions when other markets outside of the European Union are dragging their feet would be a lonely and bold move,” he said. “But it would not necessarily be the right one, and might achieve perverse effects.”
Blackmail
Squinzi went on to predict that chemical companies will have to move out of Europe if its policy-makers hug too many trees (not his exact words, I hasten to add). This is an old trick and it has worked wonders. Indeed, the trick has been played so many times that a concept called “carbon leakage” has emerged to describe industrial sectors considered at risk of financial loss from tougher climate change regulations. Those sectors are deemed eligible for higher numbers of free permits to pollute under the emissions trading scheme than other sectors.
This concept has turned into a joke. I was astonished to hear an EU official state last week that the list now covers 169 sectors, including wine and bicycle production.
Connie Hedegaard, the EU’s “climate action” commissioner, appears to be using Twitter as a negotiating tool. In a tweet earlier this month, she vented her frustration with India and the US for opposing legally-binding emission reduction targets ahead of the Durban conference. While Barack Obama should certainly be reproached for reneging on pre-election pledges to take climate change seriously, Hedegaard might contemplate sharing the blame around a bit more evenly. The truth is that the EU’s own actions on climate change are not worthy of celebration.
Speaking in Oslo last week, Hedegaard said that the EU’s emissions have gone down by 17% since 1990. By 2020, according to forecasts that the Union’s officials appear fond of citing, the EU is expected to account for 11% of all the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. By focusing so selectively on those apparent achievements, however, Hedegaard has glossed over Europe’s historical role as an environmental villain. The Third World Network, an anti-poverty group, has pointed out that industrialised countries have belched out over 70% of the world’s emissions since 1850, even though they host just 20% of the world’s inhabitants.
Hedegaard continues to promote the emission trading system as the lynchpin of the Union’s climate policy, despite how it has been plagued by fraud. Plans to bring aviation within that system will do no more than add two euros to the price of a trans-Atlantic air ticket, the Commission estimates. When emissions from aviation are projected to jump by 70% between 2005 and 2020, that step will clearly not bring the necessary reductions in air travel.
Humanity will be let down in Durban. But I guess that’s what happens when polluters are taken more seriously than doctors.
●First published by New Europe, 28 November 2011.
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Showing posts with label Connie Hedegaard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Connie Hedegaard. Show all posts
Monday, November 28, 2011
Monday, October 11, 2010
Europe sleepwalks into climate disaster
Brussels turns into a different city on Car Free Day. For 10 hours on an autumn weekend, the traffic that normally clogs our roads is replaced by the hypnotic sound of bicycle gears being shifted and leg muscles being toned. The resulting ambience has a feminine quality; for once we are given a respite from speed freaks displaying a phallic pride in their gleaming vehicles.
Why can’t we have a car free day throughout Europe every week? That would give everyone on this continent a sound reason to lampoon those “drill, Baby, drill!” Americans, who think that they are more entitled to own an SUV than to have health insurance. As things stand, though, the EU has for the most part refused to take the kind of radical green initiatives that are worthy of celebration.
Under some circumstances I would applaud European commissioners who have the temerity to criticise the ruinous policies of the US. Yet I was less than impressed with the recent speech given by Connie Hedegaard, the climate “action” chief, in Harvard, in which she berated American legislators for failing to approve a bill on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. According to Hedegaard, the EU would be prepared to accept a legally-binding accord at the international climate change negotiations in Cancún this December but dithering in Washington has made such a breakthrough impossible.
Although the US has correctly been cast as the biggest villain in the epic global warming drama, the EU has been far from virtuous. George W. Bush’s umbilical relationship with the oil industry and Barack Obama’s all-mouth-and-no-trousers posturing have created a convenient situation for senior European politicians, allowing them to pose as environmental leaders without having to do very much.
The Union’s emission reduction targets offer a case study in how us journalists are frequently duped by unscrupulous spin-doctors. On paper, the goal is to cut the amount of heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. The all-important caveats flanking this target are usually ignored. Did you know that that most of the reductions do not have to take place within the EU? In 2008, the European Parliament decided that about three-quarters of the cuts would be achieved through a process of creative accounting. Essentially, this means that we can carry on polluting here and then “off-set” our emissions by financing “clean development” projects in other parts of the world.
Just imagine that this approach was taken in other policy fields. Would anyone treat seriously a campaign against tobacco where we paid foreigners to ban smoking in the workplace, while we continued lighting up at our own desks?
Not only was the off-setting decision morally deplorable, it could transpire to be counterproductive in practical terms, if recent experience is anything to go by. When the Kyoto protocol to the UN’s climate change convention finally came into effect in 2005, it allowed rich countries to buy “clean development” credits in poorer parts of the world. Over half of the 420 million credits issued until now have related to the destruction of HFC-23, a gas used in refrigeration which is 11,700 more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. Evidence gathered by environmental watchdogs in the past few months indicates that because the system is market-based, manufacturers were deliberately producing HFC-23 so that they could be paid to destroy it. In other words, a system nominally encouraging clean development was rewarding decidedly grubby activities.
The Parliament behaved disgracefully again two weeks ago when its environment committee voted for less stringent pollution thresholds for vans than those advocated by the European Commission. Whereas the EU executive had proposed that an average van should release no more than 135 grams per kilometre by 2020, MEPs increased the limit to 140g/km, playing blind to how transport is the economic sector with the fastest growth in emissions. Hedegaard nonetheless sounded an upbeat note in her reaction to the vote, claiming that the Parliament is committed to an “ambitious” goal.
This is hogwash. But sadly it is typical of the EU’s entire agenda on climate change. Rather than trying to mitigate the effects of a catastrophe that is already claiming 300,000 lives per year (as Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum has estimated), the Brussels institutions have become fixated on avoiding any short-term pain for polluting industries.
BusinessEurope, the employers’ confederation, has been adamant that the EU must not move beyond its target to cut overall emissions by 20%. Its pressure has paid off. Reluctant to do anything that would harm “competitiveness” – a quasi-religious concept in this city – the Commission has so far declined to recommend tougher goals. As a result, the Brussels bureaucracy is out of step with the Union’s three most powerful governments. Environment ministers from Britain, France and Germany have all publicly declared that they would be in favour of a 30% goal for 2020.
During 2009, the medical journal The Lancet described climate change as the biggest threat to human health this century. Once global temperate levels rise by two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the serious consequences will no longer be confined to the poor parts of the world that our governments frankly do not care about. Heatwaves and other extreme weather conditions will affect our health in Europe, too.
By prioritising corporate profits over the future of humanity, the EU’s representatives are sleepwalking into a disaster.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 10-16 October 2010
Why can’t we have a car free day throughout Europe every week? That would give everyone on this continent a sound reason to lampoon those “drill, Baby, drill!” Americans, who think that they are more entitled to own an SUV than to have health insurance. As things stand, though, the EU has for the most part refused to take the kind of radical green initiatives that are worthy of celebration.
Under some circumstances I would applaud European commissioners who have the temerity to criticise the ruinous policies of the US. Yet I was less than impressed with the recent speech given by Connie Hedegaard, the climate “action” chief, in Harvard, in which she berated American legislators for failing to approve a bill on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. According to Hedegaard, the EU would be prepared to accept a legally-binding accord at the international climate change negotiations in Cancún this December but dithering in Washington has made such a breakthrough impossible.
Although the US has correctly been cast as the biggest villain in the epic global warming drama, the EU has been far from virtuous. George W. Bush’s umbilical relationship with the oil industry and Barack Obama’s all-mouth-and-no-trousers posturing have created a convenient situation for senior European politicians, allowing them to pose as environmental leaders without having to do very much.
The Union’s emission reduction targets offer a case study in how us journalists are frequently duped by unscrupulous spin-doctors. On paper, the goal is to cut the amount of heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. The all-important caveats flanking this target are usually ignored. Did you know that that most of the reductions do not have to take place within the EU? In 2008, the European Parliament decided that about three-quarters of the cuts would be achieved through a process of creative accounting. Essentially, this means that we can carry on polluting here and then “off-set” our emissions by financing “clean development” projects in other parts of the world.
Just imagine that this approach was taken in other policy fields. Would anyone treat seriously a campaign against tobacco where we paid foreigners to ban smoking in the workplace, while we continued lighting up at our own desks?
Not only was the off-setting decision morally deplorable, it could transpire to be counterproductive in practical terms, if recent experience is anything to go by. When the Kyoto protocol to the UN’s climate change convention finally came into effect in 2005, it allowed rich countries to buy “clean development” credits in poorer parts of the world. Over half of the 420 million credits issued until now have related to the destruction of HFC-23, a gas used in refrigeration which is 11,700 more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. Evidence gathered by environmental watchdogs in the past few months indicates that because the system is market-based, manufacturers were deliberately producing HFC-23 so that they could be paid to destroy it. In other words, a system nominally encouraging clean development was rewarding decidedly grubby activities.
The Parliament behaved disgracefully again two weeks ago when its environment committee voted for less stringent pollution thresholds for vans than those advocated by the European Commission. Whereas the EU executive had proposed that an average van should release no more than 135 grams per kilometre by 2020, MEPs increased the limit to 140g/km, playing blind to how transport is the economic sector with the fastest growth in emissions. Hedegaard nonetheless sounded an upbeat note in her reaction to the vote, claiming that the Parliament is committed to an “ambitious” goal.
This is hogwash. But sadly it is typical of the EU’s entire agenda on climate change. Rather than trying to mitigate the effects of a catastrophe that is already claiming 300,000 lives per year (as Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum has estimated), the Brussels institutions have become fixated on avoiding any short-term pain for polluting industries.
BusinessEurope, the employers’ confederation, has been adamant that the EU must not move beyond its target to cut overall emissions by 20%. Its pressure has paid off. Reluctant to do anything that would harm “competitiveness” – a quasi-religious concept in this city – the Commission has so far declined to recommend tougher goals. As a result, the Brussels bureaucracy is out of step with the Union’s three most powerful governments. Environment ministers from Britain, France and Germany have all publicly declared that they would be in favour of a 30% goal for 2020.
During 2009, the medical journal The Lancet described climate change as the biggest threat to human health this century. Once global temperate levels rise by two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the serious consequences will no longer be confined to the poor parts of the world that our governments frankly do not care about. Heatwaves and other extreme weather conditions will affect our health in Europe, too.
By prioritising corporate profits over the future of humanity, the EU’s representatives are sleepwalking into a disaster.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 10-16 October 2010
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