After last week’s EU Council deal on climate change President Sarkozy trumpeted that “this Council will go down in the history of Europe”. Perhaps it will, but for the opposite reasons to those he has in mind. This Council marks yet another milestone where industrial lobbying has triumphed over any serious anti-climate change action, where big new loopholes have been created in an increasingly complex network, and where exemptions have been permitted which are now large enough to drive a coach and horses through them. As Pyrrhus said two thousands years ago, if we have any more victories like this, we’ll all be done for.

The Poznan agreement hammered out over the weekend of 13-14 December was supposed to offer the grand triple 20-20-20 deal. Greenhouse gas emissions were to be cut by 20% by 2020 compared with the baseline of 1990, energy consumption was to be cut by 20% by the same deadline, and 20% of the EU’s energy mix was to be delivered by renewables. In fact it’s a deal riddled with loopholes, exemptions, special treatments, and dowright scams.
First, the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS), which is supposed to supply about half the greenhouse gas cuts, has come out of the wheeling-dealing more pockmarked than a gruyere cheese. Most companies in the processing industries such as steel and cement, which are the big pollution generators, have been exempted under German pressure from having to pay for the permits. In addition, coal-fired power stations in central Europe have been allowed under Polish pressure to get large discounts on the price of carbon.
This not only destroys the logic of the ‘polluter pays’ principle, it also triggers a bonanza in windfall corporate profits. The big polluting companies pocket their permits for free, and then pass on the nominal costs to consumers. The trading scheme was supposed to deliver £49bn in revenue during 2013-20. The trade-offs and free permits will ensure that it will yield just a fraction of that.
Second, the deal will be hugely weakened by ‘offsetting’ whereby States and companies can buy carbon credits from developing countries in order to meet their carbon targets at home. As a result, it is likely that only half or even less of the UK domestic carbon targets will be delivered by the use of renewables or improvements in energy efficiency made in the UK.
Third, carbon capture and storage (CCS), which is a key new technology for filtering out the most toxic emissions from power plants and feeding them back to underground storage, and which is needed to protect the planet from the huge number of new coal-fired power stations being regularly opened in China and other developing countries, is still being delayed by endless foot-dragging. It is proposed that 12 ‘demonstration’ CCS projects to sequestrate and bury CO2 will be in place by 2015, but there is still quarrelling about which States get the pilot projects and how they are funded. As ever, it will be too little, too late.

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