Published March 9, 2007
The European Union on Friday drafted a compromise agreement that would make Europe the world leader in the fight against climate change, but that would also allow some of Europe's most polluting countries to limit their environmental goals.
The draft agreement, reached after two days of heated negotiations, commits the bloc to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by the year 2020. It also will require the EU to derive a fifth of its energy from renewable sources like wind and solar energy, while fueling 10 percent of its cars and trucks on biofuels made from plants.
But under pressure from several countries of the former Soviet bloc, which rely heavily on cheap coal and oil for their energy and are reluctant to switch to more costly environmentally friendly alternatives, the EU agreed that individual targets would be allowed for each of the 27 EU members to meet the renewable energy goal.
That means that Europe's worst polluters in the fast-growing economies of the East will probably face less stringent targets than their Western counterparts.
Many of the eight former Communist nations that joined the EU in May 2004 are far behind the rest of the union in developing renewable energy. Poland, for example, derives more than 90 percent of its energy for heating from coal.
During the negotiations, landlocked countries like Slovakia and Hungary argued that developing solar and wind- based energy would burden them unfairly.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said that the agreement would help the EU become a model for the rest of the world. "This text really gives European Union policies a new quality and will establish us as a world pioneer," she said. She said she planned to press the issue in June at a meeting in Germany of the Group of 8 nations, including the United States, Japan and Russia.
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