PARIS (AFP) — European Union environment ministers cleared some ground Thursday as they debated how to achieve the vaunted dream of slashing the 27-nation bloc's carbon pollution by 2020.
Ministers, staging an informal meeting in Paris, agreed to complete a deal by year's end and backed the principle of helping poorer EU countries worried by the cost of meeting the 2020 target, delegates said.
"We are fortunately getting down to the nitty-gritty, we are getting down to serious business," French Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said, adding though that some of the talk had been "frank."
The meeting, taking place in the Saint-Cloud park on the western rim of Paris, aimed at clearing some of the many obstacles besetting the EU's goal, proclaimed as the world's standard for tackling climate-change emissions.
The aim, set last year, would reduce the EU's greenhouse-gas pollution by 20 percent by 2020 compared with a benchmark year of 1990.
Hoping to spur the United States, Japan and Canada, the EU promised to deepen this to 30 percent if other rich economies followed suit.
It also pledged to boost the share of renewables in the EU energy mix to 20 percent, including a 10-percent share for biofuels.
But agreeing on the details of these broad goals has become a touchy and complex issue in the light of the surge in oil and gas prices, while the role of biofuels has come under attack for its impact on global food prices.
Seven eastern EU members dependent on coal, Russian gas and Soviet-era nuclear plants pleaded on Thursday for get-outs or easier terms to ease the cost of meeting the target, delegates confirmed.
The delegates said one idea is to help countries with a GDP which is lower than the EU average. The funds would come from a 10-percent levy on income from the auctioning of pollution permits under Europe's emissions trading systems.
Other thorny areas include "carbon leakage," or the threat that high-polluting EU industries relocate to countries with lower restrictions, and measures to curb pollution by the transport sector.
German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said that the debate about burden-sharing within the EU was a microcosm of the global discussion between advanced and poorer economies in the UN arena.
By resolving it, the EU will set "a good example for the international climate negotiations," Gabriel said, but added: "If things don't work out, the whole world will be watching us."
British Environment Secretary Hilary Benn said it was important for the EU plan to incorporate "tangible" mechanisms enabling a 20-percent cut to be deepened to 30 percent.
"The single most important thing Europe has got to do is to show leadership, by the package we've got before us, and not just with the 20-percent commitment, but the very clear commitment to do 30 percent within an international deal," Benn told AFP.
In a sign of earnestness, ministers decided to ask the European Commission to come up with options for making the switch to 30 percent, France's climate ambassador, Brice Lalonde, said.
Ministers want to settle the most difficult issues in the climate and energy package by year's end, so that the EU is in a position to wield clout at the UN talks in Poznan, Poland, in December that will shape a worldwide pact on tackling climate change.
The accord will take effect after 2012, when the current provisions of the Kyoto Protocol expire. Agreeing it, though, has to take place at a meeting in Copenhagen at the end of 2009 to give time for countries to ratify it.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, the 15 members of the EU before the bloc's 2004 "Big Bang" expansion promised to reduce emissions of six greenhouse gases by eight percent compared to 1990 levels.
Scientists have called for cuts of between 25 and 40 percent by industrialised nations by 2020 to help peg warming to two degrees Celsius (3.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
The Saint-Cloud meeting was to finish Friday, followed immediately by an informal meeting of EU energy ministers on Friday and Saturday.
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