Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
agreement between China and the EU on
as one of
the major steps towards such a geo-economic approach. With the EU struggling to
advance global multilateral rules to the environment, cooperation with rising
powers on green trade and investment has increasingly been seen as the way for-
ward, and yet such agreements include an uneasy mix of logics:
'
green growth cooperation
'
The political
weight of the EU will depend on whether this process of green modernisation will
lead to closer cooperation on environmental problems or to intensi
'
ed global
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competition on cutting edge technologies.
'
cials advocate much more formal and high level political backing to sell
renewable technology developed in Europe to other consumer countries around
the world; that is, a more mercantile than developmental approach to climate
funding. With such support, German commercial diplomacy has been strikingly
successful, for example, in selling advanced solar panels to the Gulf, capable of
working in extremely high temperatures. The 2011 external energy security strat-
egy promises to increase political pressure behind the EU
O
s Market Access Strategy
to facilitate European renewable investments in emerging markets, and to focus on
ensuring that standards in this sector re
'
ect existing EU norms.
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BusinessEurope
has pressed for a more assertive geo-economic EU push to
,
while rising powers refuse to sign up to post-Kyoto binding targets and while they
see the EU
'
level the playing
eld
'
as failing.
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The mercantile line is evident in EU positions on intellectual property rules in
relation to low carbon technologies. DG Trade has retained a
'
s
'
leadership by example
'
rm line on this ques-
tion. Its o
cials insist that green technology is not like medicines, where the EU has
agreed to compulsory licensing agreements to allow low-cost production in devel-
oping states. They maintain that intellectual property rules are not the main obstacle
to the broader spread of green technology; the problem lies in the limited uptake of
green processes that have been around for many years and on which patents have
already lapsed. Unlike medicines, research input is only a small share of production
costs for renewables. A new renewable technology is, they argue, not comparable to a
medicine where one drug can wipe out one disease. The green technology market is
much more diverse and the availability of one new innovation will at best only have a
small impact on the overall problem. In addition, it is impossible to de
ne precisely
what is and what is not a
innovation. The line is blurred in the case of new
production methods that have an energy savings component without being a
renewable source per se. Policy-makers admit that they lean heavily on a consulting
report which argued that intellectual property rights (IPR) have not restricted the
spread of green technology; that there is su
'
green
'
cient competition in low carbon sectors
to have pushed prices down, with no evidence that IPR have created monopolistic
market positions; and that most green technologies are not covered by IPR.
53
The
rm line is being maintained despite this complicating free trade talks.
