EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Europe risks again being sidelined, as in the final hours of the UN climate talks in December, unless the bloc speaks with one voice at future talks, the incoming climate commissioner warned on Friday (15 January). "There are very important lessons from Copenhagen. In the last hours, China, India, Russia, Japan each spoke with one voice, while Europe spoke with many different voices," Denmark's Connie Hedegaard, the presumptive new 'climate action' chief, told MEPs during her job hearing in the European Parliament....She also backed the EU's promise to upgrade its 20 percent carbon reduction target to 30 percent. "I very much hope that by Mexico of course we could go to 30 percent," she said, referring to the next UN climate conference at the end of 2010.By the end of the grilling, she had very clearly won over the chamber, with deputies joking with her about whether she would be taking a bicycle to work from now on."I go as often as I can by bike in Copenhagen ...but there are just not that many bike lanes in Belgium. I have to study the security situation, but my husband gave me a bike helmet for Christmas," Ms Hedegaard said.
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Europe risks again being sidelined, as in the final hours of the UN climate talks in December, unless the bloc speaks with one voice at future talks, the incoming climate commissioner warned on Friday (15 January).
"There are very important lessons from Copenhagen. In the last hours, China, India, Russia, Japan each spoke with one voice, while Europe spoke with many different voices," Denmark's Connie Hedegaard, the presumptive new 'climate action' chief, told MEPs during her job hearing in the European Parliament.
...She also backed the EU's promise to upgrade its 20 percent carbon reduction target to 30 percent. "I very much hope that by Mexico of course we could go to 30 percent," she said, referring to the next UN climate conference at the end of 2010.
By the end of the grilling, she had very clearly won over the chamber, with deputies joking with her about whether she would be taking a bicycle to work from now on.
"I go as often as I can by bike in Copenhagen ...but there are just not that many bike lanes in Belgium. I have to study the security situation, but my husband gave me a bike helmet for Christmas," Ms Hedegaard said.
The problem was that China did not want to do anything, and the US did not want to do anything without China; the only pressure is that neither wanted to be seen as being the "official" obstacle, so they negotiated together a face-saving announcement.
The EU might have decided to take a tough line and say that this was not a real agreement of anything, refusing to sign, but it's not obvious that it would have helped prod negotiations any further. Right now there is widespread perception that nothing was achieved and negotiations must go on, and there is only one framework that exists to get something done: the one already set up by Europeans... In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
