E3G

Media Brief: New EU Climate Change Package Fails to Tame King Coal

By Nick Mabey

This week the European Commission publishes a package of proposed measures to drive forward Europe’s response to the climate change threat, implementing the March 2007 European Council committments to 20% emission reductions, 20% improvement in energy efficiency, and 20% more renewable energy by the year 2020 compared to 1990 levels.

Central to this must be the effective encouragement of carbon capture and storage technology as a part of a strategy for the transition to a low carbon future.

A new E3G media brief outlines the current failings of the package on offer, and proposes 5 key improvements that must be made now.

The text of the briefing follows below and is attached as a pdf download.

New EU Climate Change Package Fails to Tame King Coal

Media Brief from E3G

London, 22nd January 2008

The European Commission has retreated from its ambition of making the EU the first advanced economy to decarbonise its power sector by scaling back plans for developing and deploying carbon capture and storage technology.

Even if the EU meets its new, ambitious renewable energy targets, around 70% of new power capacity in Europe will come from fossil fuels over the next 25 years. High gas prices and fears over dependence on Russia are making coal the new fuel of choice, with 40 major new coal power plants planned to be built in the next 5 years. This will undermine the EU’s own 2050 emission targets, and the EU’s global climate objectives.

In 2007 the Commission put forward an ambitious plan to tackle global coal use by building 12 large scale demonstration plants using carbon capture and storage (CCS), aiming to make CCS mandatory for all new plants by 2020, and retrofitting all plants built after 2010. This package would have decarbonised the EU power sector by 2050, and created the new technology needed to tackle rapidly growing coal emissions in China, India and the USA.

The new climate package steps back from these ambitions. It fails to provide guaranteed EU funding to deliver the CCS demonstration plants, and may only look at mandatory deployment of CCS as a last resort if private sector investment in CCS is slow. It fails to drive global cooperation through strengthening programmes on CCS with China, India and the USA.

The package may require power stations to buy 100% of the permits needed to cover their emissions from 2012, which would provide a strong disincentive to build new coal power stations. But this provision may be weakened in the final negotiations.

Nick Mabey, Chief Executive of E3G, said:

Europe is rightly investing billions of Euros in forcing the development and deployment of renewable energy, but renewables alone cannot reduce the scale and pace of emissions growth in China, India and the USA. European leadership requires a far stronger package of funding and regulation to drive the development of carbon capture and storage at a global scale, as only this can preserve the climate security of European citizens”