Back to Brussels Blog homepage
Paying the climate change bill
September 4, 2008
How much will it cost the European Union to fight global climate change? Clearly, the answer depends on what your target is, how you propose to get there, and the size of the EU’s contribution compared with those of the US, China and so on. But a new report from the Centre for European Policy Studies thinktank offers some useful estimates.
The report assesses six recent studies, ranging from the Stern Review and a World Bank analysis to research prepared by Vattenfall, the Swedish energy company. In these reports, the average annual global costs for mitigating and adapting to climate change are put at anything from €230bn to €614bn, based on 2006 data.
The EU is not, these days, one of the world’s great polluters. In 2004, the global economy emitted about 49bn tons of greenhouse gases (measured in CO2 equivalent). The share of the 27-nation bloc was only 5.2bn tons, or 10.6 per cent.
However, as western Europe is one of the world’s richest areas, and as Europe has historical responsibility for the CO2 emissions of its industrial heyday, the EU will surely have to pay more than 10.6 per cent of the global costs of fighting climate change.
According to the CEPS study, the smallest bill the EU could expect to pick up is €24.4bn a year, while the biggest is €194.3bn. The thinktank’s own estimate, based on what it calls “the limited likelihood of a global burden-sharing according to current emissions”, is that the EU will face annual costs of at least €60bn.
This figure is close to the forecast provided by the European Commission last January, when it published its all-encompassing proposals on energy and climate change policy. At the time, the Commission said €60bn - or about 0.5 per cent of the EU’s annual GDP - might seem a lot of money, but the cost of doing nothing would be even higher.
Has the message got through, I wonder, to Germany’s car manufacturers and their friends in the European Parliament? This week the legislature’s industry committee tried to weaken a Commission proposal for capping CO2 emissions from new cars.
Rather than imposing a target of 130 grams per kilometre on all new cars by 2012, the committee voted to apply it to only 60 per cent of new cars and to delay full introduction of the target until 2015. The vote was unmistakeably aimed at helping German carmakers, whose models are bigger and less “green” than those of France and Italy.
This is, of course, hardly the last word on the subject. The parliamentary committee’s vote isn’t binding. But when it comes to converting the EU’s high-sounding principles on climate change into concrete legislation, the devil is always in the detail.
There is no relation between CO2 emission and Climate Change.This is a creation of lobbies,for business interest.The climate change is mainly a product of solar emission and,when temperature goes up,the CO2 rate in the Atmosphere goes up,too.So the “scientists” who talks about a relation between temperature and CO2 rate are exchanging cause and effect.
Posted by: stefano de santis | September 6th, 2008 at 9:34 am | Report this commentThe earth is cooling down, this is a natural occirance as the core cools. Sice 1999 the temperature of the air has reduced, and started falling before all of this greenhouse gas nonsense was mooted by a non scientific self serving politician.
The Carbon trading is just another eu stealth tax, and it is these people who are going to turn the european continent into a third world area with their constant money grabbing and stupid lowest common denominator laws. of course they have the backing of people with their own agendas such as Maria Mcaffery the Chief executive of the windenergy association who claims that wind energy is free, whilst failing to mention the obvious point that the generaters don’t come free, the cabling to join the grid, and the control of the energy generated doesn’t come free the maintenance doesn’t come free, and running it doesn’t come free. It is also not a reliable source of power becaus eof the variation in seasonal wind levels.
Posted by: Barry Davies | September 6th, 2008 at 12:10 pm | Report this commentOver in the US the Al Gore $800 Million Dollar cap and trade fund is running ads on television promoting the idea of shutting down the US economcy for this bogus ‘global warming’ fraud. Al Gore stand to become a billionaire with his fund. Money does talk and in this case what it is saying is nothing more than a monster lie.
Posted by: Jack LeCerveau | September 6th, 2008 at 11:55 pm | Report this commentThere’s a solid, and growing, base of scientists whose research contradicts that of the IPCC and their “concensus.” As long as governments refuse to listen to them, any attempts by these governments to spend the huge sums to save the planet from fossil fuel emissions should be firmly opposed.
Posted by: Jeff | September 7th, 2008 at 12:39 pm | Report this commentMy congratulations to Tony Barber for such a good report of the gab between the rethoric of the EU on climate change and the sad reality of industrial lobbies in Brussels.
The same lobbies that are paying leading public communications firms to monitor the web 24h per day and to post misleading comments on climate change (as shown by the previous posts on this blog).
Just to make things straight-forward: the earth is not cooling down, rather it is warming up a rate unseen in the history. Man-made CO2 is indeed the main cause of climate change and there is not scientific and respectable evidence of the contrary (unless junk reports financed by petrol and coal lobbies).
Polluting companies, e.g. German energy giant RWE to name one, need to weak up to the smell of carbon: global warming is a reality, CO2 emissions must be capped and slashed significantly - through sound emissions tradings policies, clean energy must swiftly replace fossil fuels, paricularly coal.
By the time their CEOs have understood this other smater companies will have taken up your markets!
Posted by: Giovanni Cervello | September 8th, 2008 at 11:11 pm | Report this comment