There has been much talk of the Franco-German motor that has traditionally propelled the European Union breaking down recently. So the cancellation of a meeting last week between the two countries to discuss proposals to cut pollution from cars led to plenty of puns.

The German press said the process has stalled but the French government said that was overblown. Whatever happens, the two biggest automakers in the European Union will have to strike a deal over  whose companies will have to make the biggest changes to ensure the European Union meets - or at least comes close to - its climate change targets.

The gas-guzzling, supercharged German machines have a head start. Angela Merkel’s government has made clear that the continent’s biggest producer cannot accept European Commission plans for swingeing fines from 2012 for manufacturers who do not hit targets. Brussels’ draft directive calls for a 25 per cent cut to an average emission of 120g or carbon per kilometre by 2012.

Savvy punters in Brussels expect the date to slip to 2015.  The European parliament, its members having one eye on the car plants in their constituencies, has already voted in favour of this.

ACEA, the carmakers’ lobby group, argues that since it takes five years to design a car they need that time to come up with the necessary models. And 6 out of 10 cars on the road now will still be on the road in 2012. Arguments that ACEA itself signed up voluntarily to such a target a decade  ago are rebutted. Governments did not keep their side of the bargain through tax breaks, improving congestion and other measures to encourage consumers to embrace smaller cars, it says.

France, like Italy, makes smaller cars so is closer to the 2012 target and has less to lose. However, it also inherits the presidency of the EU in July and is desperate for some big successes. They are not going to come without German co-operation. France wants an outline deal by the time EU environment ministers meet in June.

Gloomy Commission officials and green groups expect a compromise that would put the EU even further off course from its target of cutting emissions by 20 per cent between 1990 and 2020. The meeting may have been cancelled but a Greenpeace protest went ahead. Transport is the only sector where emissions are growing and the European Environment Agency has already determined that the Commission’s car package is not radical enough.

If one sector does less, then others must do more. Allowing cars to burn more carbon will mean factories, power stations or households will have to burn even less.

This race is nowhere near as predictable as a grand prix, however. As one of those behind the wheel observed, national trade-offs between issues can produce unpredictable results. This race will be won on the last bend.

Thursday’s thundering Financial Times editorial on the food crisis unfortunately arrived too late to change opinions on the 13th floor of the Berlaymont, the European Commission nerve centre. The day before the call for a pause in the push for biofuels was made Jose Manuel Barroso, Commission president, defended the policy.

He said the use of crops for fuel had so far had little effect on higher food prices. It can’t be often that the Commission disagrees with its multilateral brethren, the IMF, World Bank and United Nations.

Barroso said the push to increase biofuels to 10 per cent of the EU transport fuel mix by 2020 will continue. In fact, by creating a market for sustainable biofuels the EU could improve their production round the world, he said.

Perhaps he will listen to the EU’s own scientific advisers. On Thursday advisers to the European Environment Agency called for the target to be scrapped.

“The overambitious 10 per cent target is an experiment, whose unintended effects are difficult to predict and difficult to control,” they said.

However, Barroso did warn of a human tragedy caused by high food prices and called on EU countries to lift their giving to affected countries.

The link between the EU policies and food shortagesis beginning to worry some in the Berlaymont. It is seeking to end export subsidies that see cheap food dumped on poor countries. However, there are still many high tariff barriers that prevent poor farmers exporting to the EU. Doubtless this debate will become a centrepiece of the haggling over the mid-term review of the common agricultural policy this year.

France is already talking about the need for “food security” while Franz Fischler, former agriculture commissioner who keeps on top of the issues, told me recently that Europe has a duty to feed itself and the world.

Meanwhile, Andris Piebalgs, the energy commissioner, has been making the case for stimulating investment in farm productivity through the biofuels target.

He wrote in a recent blog post: “Substantial tracts of arable land lie fallow since the collapse of the collective farming system used during Communist times in many of the new Member States. The EU’s ambitious but realistic 10% target will provide the market pull stimulation that these farmers need to face a future market based agricultural economy and less dependence on EU subsidies.”

But with Gordon Brown among others calling for a change of stance, I wouldn’t advise any farmer to start sowing the seeds of biofuel crops until they are sure of exactly what they will reap.

Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, promised us a “new industrial revolution” last year and it looks as though he might just deliver.

Barroso seized on climate change as a new raison d’etre for the bloc on its 50^th birthday, now that war between its members was a distance memory. An economy built on fossil fuel would have to be weaned off it, he said.

No one really believed him, though the club’s 27 members were dragged far enough along, with differing levels of enthusiasm, to endorse fairly stiff targets for greenhouse gas reductions – a fifth below 1990 levels by 2020.

The potential gains are great, but the pain is also becoming clear, and as the Commission prepares to deliver its medicine on January 23 howls are growing louder around Europe.

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A friend of mine who works for the European Commission’s internal market directorate  moaned the other day that it was “turning into the OECD”. In other words, it had stopped bludgeoning the barriers to trade in the EU market with a battering ram of regulations and was instead consulting, advising and recommending change . But the OECD, a dry economic think tank , seems to be turning into the European Commission, judging by the latest furore surrounding it.

In early September its round table on sustainable development met to discuss a report entitled “Biofuels – is the cure worse than the disease”. The academic paper fuelled a controversy that has burned for several weeks.

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How green is the European Commission? It claimed on Thursday it was very green indeed. A leader in fighting climate change and cutting car pollution, it would now seek to become a green imperium, pushing others around the world to adopt its ways.

The European Union’s global environmental policies should become “one of the core objectives of EU external relations policy”, a mid-term review said. There should be EU-wide taxes to encourage good environmental behaviour.

After all, commissioner Stavros Dimas pointed out, much remained to be done. "Global emissions of greenhouse gases are rising, the loss of biodiversity is not yet under control, pollution is still harming public health and volumes of waste are increasing in Europe,” he said.

What was needed was more money and ensuring a green tinge to everything from energy to agriculture policy. It was a breathtaking power grab and a huge contrast to when Jose Manuel Barroso’s Commission took office.

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Once again the European Commission stands accused of doing something of which we are all guilty: not putting its money where its mouth is. It calls for Europe-wide smoking bans while subsidising tobacco farmers; it throws money at poor countries while reducing their chances to enrich themselves by blocking some of their products.

The latest alleged hypocrisy is giving billions in aid to recent joiners for projects that will contribute to big greenhouse gas emission rises.

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If there’s one thing that Brussels can teach the world, it’s how to move VIPs around fast.

Most days you’ll hear sirens as elite police outriders clear the roads so that motorcades of black Mercedes and Audis can whisk visiting presidents and prime ministers to meetings.

The police teams are certainly effective at sweeping through the city’s clogged streets. One diplomat told me of a hair-raising seven-minute journey in a convoy from the airport to the EU district during rush hour. Ordinarily, that car ride would take 25 minutes in light traffic.

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David Cameron’s new Movement for European Reform is a strange thing. Launched by the British Conservative leader on Tuesday in Brussels, there were several things which struck me as slightly unusual about the inauguration of this new centre-right group.

The first was the fact that the Conservatives had gone to the trouble to bring along about 90 students from London schools to "see at first hand" Europe’s future being discussed: they also performed the useful role of filling empty seats at the back of the hall and looking youthful.

The second is the fact that the Movement for European Reform - which is intended to pave the way in 2009 to the creation of a new political group in the European parliament - does not actually really exist.

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Even in this age of putting a price on hot air, words come cheaper than carbon emissions. So not a few MEPs are unimpressed by a resolution on climate change to be approved on Wednesday.

This resolution calling for political leadership comes while the full parliament sits in Strasbourg, having been followed there by a convoy of lorries carrying documents and other essentials from Brussels and Luxembourg, its other seats.

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As previewed on Tuesday, the European parliament passed its resolution on climate change on Wednesday, calling for a unilateral 30 per cent cut in carbon emissions below 1990 levels by the EU by 2020, higher than the 20 per cent sought by the European Commission: The sponsor of the resolution, Karl-Heinz Florenz, is certainly doing his bit. For a year he has been energy self-sufficient:

"It is an individual responsibility: Everybody has a roof over their head and this roof could have solar panels on." He has solar panels and a wood-fired boiler fuelled by deadwood from the wood on his farm. "I use no oil," he says proudly:

Florenz, who was chairman of the environment commitee until last month; also takes the train to Strasbourg from his home in Germany, just over the Belgian border:

Fellow promoters of his resolution had less to boast about. Fellow German Peter Liese has bought a VW Lupo low-emission car, which is being withdrawn from production because of poor sales.

British Conservative John Bowis says he was examining his carbon footprint. "If we don’t do it, someone else will," he said.