Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi led a rebellion against the European Union’s (EU) commitment to greenhouse gas reduction last week claiming the plans are too expensive.
“Our businesses are in absolutely no position at the moment to absorb the costs of the regulations that have been proposed,” Mr. Berlusconi said after a fiery debate during the European Councils meeting in Brussels.
Mr. Berlusconi’s concerns were echoed by seven other (EU) countries – Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia – who said they would resist any efforts by the EU president, France’s leader Nicolas Sarkozy, to push through the EU-agreed target of a 20 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions from 1990 levels by 2020.
President Sarkozy is keen to fix each country’s share of emission cuts before January 1 when the European presidency passes to the Czech Republic. Czech President Vaclav Klaus has publicly questioned the existence of man-made climate change and has indicated he will scale back commitments to greenhouse gas reduction.
Dr. Stephen Williams, director of the Center for Tropical Biodiversity and Climate Change Research at Queensland’s James Cook University, said he could understand European leaders’ concerns, but believed they were short-sighted.
“As many reports have shown, we won’t have an economy if it gets too bad,” he told The Epoch Times. “… I mean, many reports around the world have pointed out that the economic cost of climate change will make this particular recession look insignificant.”
Green New Deal
Christine Milne from the Australian Greens said it was definitely not the time to slow down on climate investment as climate change initiatives could provide a major injection into the economy.
Senator Milne said the UK was set to launch a “Green New Deal”, similar to that of US President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” response to the Great Depression, and this would highlight the importance of addressing the financial crisis with climate change initiatives.
“Now is the time to invest in ecosystem services, in climate initiatives, retro-fit houses, bring in energy efficiency, renewable energy and save the environment as the basis of the economy,” she said.
Ross Garnaut, author of the Australian Government’s report on climate change, said the financial crisis should not stand in the way of long-term issues like climate change.
“We need to begin by noting this is not a matter of choosing the environment over the economy or the economy over the environment,” he said.
“The issue of climate change is an economic issue. The issue is one of short-term economics versus long-term economics, because the economic costs of unmitigated climate change on a balance of probability would be very, very high.”
Environmentalists in Australia are watching the Rudd Government closely as the latter comes to grips with the effects of the global financial meltdown.
The Federal Government is already running behind schedule on a number of climate change initiatives.
Final details of the Government’s 20 percent renewable energy scheme were due to be released last month and Treasury’s economic modeling on the implications of emissions trading are already four months late.
Mr. Garnaut said he remained positive that Australia’s leaders will not lose sight of the longer term issue, but Nicholas Stern, author of the influential Stern Review on Climate Change commissioned by the British Government, said the financial crisis would pre-occupy politicians.
“Politicians, like any other human beings, have limited powers to think about two things at once,” he said.
Financial crisis an opportunity
Speaking at the London School of Economics (LSE) earlier this week, Lord Stern said the financial slowdown should be seen as an opportunity for climate change action, the online Environmental Finance Publication reported.
The current financial crisis was 10 to 20 years in the making and it was a good example of how things could turn bad very quickly, he said.
“Climate change is very similar. The current crisis is showing us the consequences of ignoring our long-term actions.
“We’re also going to have to grow out of this – we’ll be looking for engines of growth to pull us out and low-carbon growth will be a very important engine,” he added.
Dr Williams said the global community’s co-operative reaction to the financial crisis was the approach that should be taken to climate change.
“It is a good introduction to what we may have to deal with in climate change,” he said, adding: “Climate change might exacerbate or make an economic recession even worse than this one.”
The speed and evident meltdown in financial institutions was also an indication of how quickly things could unravel.
Dr Williams said the effects of climate change were creeping up on the world faster than expected and that even the extreme indicators predicted by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had already been reached or exceeded.
