Bellona nuclear digest. March 2024
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
News
Publish date: December 17, 2008
Written by: Eivind Hoff
News
The vote today effectively rubberstamps the agreement reached last Friday amongst all EU heads of state and government. The legislative process has been completed at record speed, notably in order to give EU negotiators backing for ambitious offers in the UN climate change negotiations due to be completed in December 2009. The four pieces of legislation are:
Below are some positive and negative highlights of these legislative acts.
1) Revision of the directive on the EU emission trading system (ETS)
This is the most important and most controversial of all the four. It brings crucial improvements to the ETS, and will take effect in 2013:
The main weakness of the revised ETS directive is that it opens up for up to half of emission reductions to be reached abroad – through purchasing of external credits (in particular Clean Development Mechanism INSERT HYPERLINK credits). This will reduce the demand for EU emission allowances and thus their price and the incentive to cut emissions.
2) New decision on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions not covered by the ETS
This “effort-sharing” decision splits between the Member States the target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to ensure that EU emissions in 2020 are 10% lower than in 2005 for those sectors not covered by the ETS. These are all the smaller emission points such as transport, housing, agriculture etc. Altogether, these sectors cover 55-60% of EU emissions.
This is the legislative act of the package with the least “bite”: More than 70% of emission reductions between now and 2020 may be achieved abroad through external credits. Anders Wijkman, Swedish Member of the EP, summed up the feeling of green minds: “I wonder what the effect will be of such a high share of flexibility mechanisms. Science says we need to reduce emissions by 80-95% by 2050 – how can we do that if we delay domestic reductions until after 2020? This is not going to do the job,” he said.
The EP nevertheless strengthened the weak decision somewhat through clauses that:
3) New directive on geological storage of CO2
The directive in itself was rather uncontroversial, as it mainly sets out minimum requirements to ensure environmental and human health safety of CO2 storage and respect for the polluter-pays principle.
The more controversial issues in the directive are resolved as follows:
The main political controversy around the directive, however, related not to storage safety:
4) New directive on renewable energy sources
This directive is perhaps the most ambitious of the lot, setting out a binding target for the EU Member States to increase the share of renewable energy from 8.5% in 2005 to 20% in 2020. Still, it was amongst the least controversial, as economic growth, employment and environmental arguments converged. Only Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi had help up an agreement. The EP rapporteur, Claude Turmes, thanked in particular the French presidency of the EU – without it “we may not have managed to hold Berlusconi down last week”, he said, referring to the EU summit on December 11th-12th.
While the main achievement is the overall target for renewable energy production, the final deal improved in some respects to the original Commission proposal:
French minister for sustainable development, Jean-Louis Borloo, told the Parliament:
“This is an exceptional achievement. The difference of national renewables targets was not the topic of discussion! It shows that European solidarity works.”
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
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