EU Commission to debate 2030 targets

After repeated delays the European Union’s twenty-seven Commissioners will meet this month to debate 2030 climate and energy legislation.

Bluntly put, they must decide whether or not to stand up to industry scaremongering on job losses and factory relocations. They face a choice between developing effective policies, or side-lining climate action – supposedly to placate the economic crisis.

Effective action would be three binding targets for 2030. An ambitious greenhouse gas reduction target, and also energy savings and renewable energy targets to ensure emissions cuts are achieved and Europe moves away from fossil fuels. A sell-out would be no targets at all. Or one weak greenhouse gas target with plenty of loopholes to allow business-as-usual.

If the Commissioners give in, eyes wide shut, it will be due to the constant drip-dripping of industry opposition.

Trying to understand the motives behind this opposition is a head-scratcher.

Maybe some industry lobbyists really are tea-party style climate change deniers. Or at least nine-to-five climate change deniers – doubtless becoming concerned citizens once they doff their Commission lobby access badges.

Or possibly they don’t deny climate change but think we’ll be able to develop technological fixes before it’s too late. In some cases, however, it’s the very development of technology, coupled with our inability to use it sensibly, that has brought about climate change. This is not an anti-technology point. It is simply to say we shouldn’t count on developing a miraculous silver bullet.

Alternatively, industry opponents could be seeking to constrain climate legislation because they assume it increases the cost of producing goods and damages their competitiveness compared to foreign companies. And although an international deal on emissions would mean a level playing field, perhaps jaded industrialists don’t trust each other to respect pledges.

Maybe the arguments just aren’t being thought through. A big issue is energy prices, and the blinkered industry claim is that it is environmental legislation – and not costly oil and gas imports – which is pushing prices up. Their thinking, therefore, is that legislation is bad, and no right-minded politician should support it. Legislators, they say, will be directly responsible for forcing industries to flee Europe to produce, and pollute, elsewhere. (Labour costs, clearly, are beside the point).

Whatever it is, scientific evidence and plain common sense are giving way to a form of economic myopia. It's as if Nicholas Stern’s lessons on the cost of climate inaction being greater than the cost of action are already forgotten. Or maybe, since Stern took the progressive line, he has been dismissed as a naïve idealist. Presumably the World Bank’s ‘Turn Down The Heat’ study is also rejected as the work of rogue economists.

We simply don’t agree with this opposition. Just consider the effect of energy savings. We will soon publish a report from research group Ecofys which estimates that the net financial benefits of tough energy savings policies for 2030 will be €180 billion per year. That’s almost half of what the EU currently spends on oil and gas imports. Or to put it differently, it’s savings equivalent to the entire GDP of Finland in the pockets of EU governments, businesses and citizens.

Research for the German environment ministry by Fraunhofer ISI puts the EU’s cost-effective 2030 energy savings potential at double the Commission’s own modelling. This is equivalent to thirteen years of German energy consumption. It looks like a huge business opportunity. Tough legislation seems to add-up economically regardless of the urgent need to tackle climate change. And certainly considering the costs of inaction. Any industry people out there who agree, do make your voices heard. And come on Commissioners, be ambitious this once.

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