Europe Sets Ambitious Limits on Greenhouse Gases

The European Union approved a compromise agreement on Friday that would make Europe the world’s leader in the fight against climate change but would also allow some of Europe’s most polluting countries to limit their environmental goals.

Issuing a challenge to the United States, China and India to match European ambitions in the battle against global warming, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany called on the world to follow the European Union’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020. She said the bloc’s 27 members would commit to a 30 percent reduction if other nations followed suit.
The plan goes beyond the 35-nation Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrial nations to reduce the emission of global-warming gases by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Major European Union economies had already committed to do better than that, promising to decrease greenhouse gases by 8 percent in that time.

The accord by the European Union — unveiled after two days of heated negotiations and hailed by President Jacques Chirac of France as “a great moment in European history” — will require the bloc to derive a fifth of its energy from renewable sources like wind and solar power by 2020. Renewables account for less than 7 percent of the energy mix used by the Europeans.

The bloc will also be required to fuel 10 percent of its cars and trucks on biofuels made from plants by 2020.

Mrs. Merkel said the agreement would help the European Union become a model for the rest of the world. “This text really gives European Union policies a new quality and will establish us as a world pioneer,” she said.

New York Times, registration required.