Blog
24.November 2009 - 22:56
The job ain’t done before ratification
On Monday, in the context of the Copenhagen Conference, the Parliament’s Environment Committee held an additional meeting in Strasbourg, during which the Swedish Minister already predicted the results. Of course, it is obvious that the estimations include a great portion of official optimism – but perhaps, it should be so. Therefore, it was no wonder that the minister spoke of the agreement, as if it could be achieved in Copenhagen – even if not quite in finished form, as certain technical details will take a couple of months more, but it would still be a rather comprehensive agreement.
This means that the EU would have a 30 percent job to do.
Satu Hassi has predicted the same and so too have a couple of other eager supporters of the unilateral restrictions.
Cool down, guys. Even if climate warming increased, the brain should not become too heated.
Especially as partners, such as the US, haven’t even promised to support any binding agreements.
Secondly, we should very well remember, what was entered in the directives along with the approval of the climate change and energy package. The EU’s emission reduction target of 20% will only change to 30% if the other industrial countries show “comparable reduction efforts” and the developing countries also have some kinds of obligations. At the same time, the special treatment of so-called carbon leakage industries would be removed.
Just a mere political agreement is not a sufficient result of the Copenhagen Conference. On the other hand, neither is a legally binding agreement, even though it may contain the 30 percent cut for all industrial countries, since a legally binding agreement as such is not binding on anything as long as the countries haven’t ratified the agreement. It took almost eight years for the Kyoto Protocol to enter into force. The EU cannot ascertain until the agreement has been ratified, whether the preset condition concerning the comparable reduction measures has been fulfilled.
Some are convinced that the political deal, which should be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Conference, would be easy to complement to a more detailed juridical agreement. I am convinced that this is not possible.
First of all, the global post-2012 juridical agreement on climate policy includes accurate texts concerning hundreds of questions with headings such as:
– quantitative emission reduction obligations for the industrial countries until 2020 or possibly until 2050
– nominal emission efforts of developing countries until 2020 and onwards
– financial aid from industrialised countries to the developing countries
– development and transfer of technology
– sinks and the related calculation rules.
There are dozens of individual issues related to these aforementioned matters, in which the countries should find common ground.
If we were optimistically just assuming that the countries will find a common ground at the Copenhagen Conference concerning the draft version of the agreement frame listing a couple of the post-2012 climate political issues, we’ll need years for the negotiation process to be completed with all the details. And then, during this process, every one of the countries will try to minimise its future cost burden. This control by vested interest, which all of the countries have practiced during these 15 years of COP history and due to which the global climate negotiations have advanced so slowly, refers to the division of costs of billions of euros from one country to another.
The final division of the climate political burden post-2012 will be defined within this long process. And when this game is over, we will finally to be able to find out whether the EU’s demand concerning the competing countries has been realised.
But, as we saw during the meeting of the Environment Committee just a couple of weeks ago, the Greens and the environmental organisations do not care in the slightest about the EU’s competitive strength and the conditions that were entered in the Emissions Trading Scheme or about the threatening carbon leakage. To be sure, these people do not want any kind of objective analysis on these issues. A bunch of MEPs (including Hassi and Pietikäinen from the Finns) already tried to abate the specification of carbon leakage industries obliged by the Emissions Trading Directive, but the majority of the Committee rejected this attempt.
This may sound very juridical and bureaucratic when expressed in this way, but as a matter of fact, this simply concerns jobs. It is quite absurd that the world’s cleanest industry should be ashamed of its climate policy. These kinds of measures will not diminish emissions but transfer them somewhere else. We’ve now reached the same point once again, when Commissioner Verheugen exclaimed over emissions trading: “We are exporting pollution and importing unemployment – isn’t that stupid?”
On Monday, in the context of the Copenhagen Conference, the Parliament’s Environment Committee held an additional meeting in Strasbourg, during which the Swedish Minister already predicted the results. Of course, it is obvious that the estimations include a great portion of official optimism – but perhaps, it should be so. Therefore, it was no wonder that the minister spoke of the agreement, as if it could be achieved in Copenhagen – even if not quite in finished form, as certain technical details will take a couple of months more, but it would still be a rather comprehensive agreement.
This means that the EU would have a 30 percent job to do.
Satu Hassi has predicted the same and so too have a couple of other eager supporters of the unilateral restrictions.
Cool down, guys. Even if climate warming increased, the brain should not become too heated.
Especially as partners, such as the US, haven’t even promised to support any binding agreements.
Secondly, we should very well remember, what was entered in the directives along with the approval of the climate change and energy package. The EU’s emission reduction target of 20% will only change to 30% if the other industrial countries show “comparable reduction efforts” and the developing countries also have some kinds of obligations. At the same time, the special treatment of so-called carbon leakage industries would be removed.
Just a mere political agreement is not a sufficient result of the Copenhagen Conference. On the other hand, neither is a legally binding agreement, even though it may contain the 30 percent cut for all industrial countries, since a legally binding agreement as such is not binding on anything as long as the countries haven’t ratified the agreement. It took almost eight years for the Kyoto Protocol to enter into force. The EU cannot ascertain until the agreement has been ratified, whether the preset condition concerning the comparable reduction measures has been fulfilled.
Some are convinced that the political deal, which should be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Conference, would be easy to complement to a more detailed juridical agreement. I am convinced that this is not possible.
First of all, the global post-2012 juridical agreement on climate policy includes accurate texts concerning hundreds of questions with headings such as:
– quantitative emission reduction obligations for the industrial countries until 2020 or possibly until 2050
– nominal emission efforts of developing countries until 2020 and onwards
– financial aid from industrialised countries to the developing countries
– development and transfer of technology
– sinks and the related calculation rules.
There are dozens of individual issues related to these aforementioned matters, in which the countries should find common ground.
If we were optimistically just assuming that the countries will find a common ground at the Copenhagen Conference concerning the draft version of the agreement frame listing a couple of the post-2012 climate political issues, we’ll need years for the negotiation process to be completed with all the details. And then, during this process, every one of the countries will try to minimise its future cost burden. This control by vested interest, which all of the countries have practiced during these 15 years of COP history and due to which the global climate negotiations have advanced so slowly, refers to the division of costs of billions of euros from one country to another.
The final division of the climate political burden post-2012 will be defined within this long process. And when this game is over, we will finally to be able to find out whether the EU’s demand concerning the competing countries has been realised.
But, as we saw during the meeting of the Environment Committee just a couple of weeks ago, the Greens and the environmental organisations do not care in the slightest about the EU’s competitive strength and the conditions that were entered in the Emissions Trading Scheme or about the threatening carbon leakage. To be sure, these people do not want any kind of objective analysis on these issues. A bunch of MEPs (including Hassi and Pietikäinen from the Finns) already tried to abate the specification of carbon leakage industries obliged by the Emissions Trading Directive, but the majority of the Committee rejected this attempt.
This may sound very juridical and bureaucratic when expressed in this way, but as a matter of fact, this simply concerns jobs. It is quite absurd that the world’s cleanest industry should be ashamed of its climate policy. These kinds of measures will not diminish emissions but transfer them somewhere else. We’ve now reached the same point once again, when Commissioner Verheugen exclaimed over emissions trading: “We are exporting pollution and importing unemployment – isn’t that stupid?”