Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
twenty percent cut in emissions and an average twenty percent renewable
share of total energy by 2020.
But differentiation was also a moral imperative. Renewable energy sim-
ply costs more money than fossil fuels, and equal renewable targets for all
27 EU states would have placed a disproportionate financial burden on
poorer states. (In fact, if you wanted to go about apportioning renewable
energy quotas and targets in Europe in a purely cost-efficient manner,
ignoring national affluence and culpability, you would give higher targets
to the poorer Eastern states, because their forests, farmland and rivers
contain more potential for renewable biomass and hydropower than
remains in western Europe. If you went about climate change in the same
way - disregarding historic responsibility for nineteenth and twentieth
century industrial pollution or income differentials between countries -
you would ask China to cut emissions as much as the US, and more than
Europe or Japan. For China has far more potential to reduce its emissions
than Europe or Japan.)
The EU is a little different from the rest of the world. In a permanent
union of neighbouring countries, which supposedly aspire to common
values and which have common policies to promote economic cohesion,
you would expect richer states to take on more of the common burden
than poorer members. Some of the EU's poorer Eastern states still grum-
ble that they are being asked to make too rapid an energy transformation
of their economies. Nonetheless, the EU has an eighth of all the world's
countries in its membership, and a spread in wealth per head between
richest (Luxembourg) and poorest (Bulgaria) that is wider than the
income gap between the US and China. Its acceptance of common but
differentiated responsibilities is encouraging.
