Poland warns EU climate change deal far from sealed
(BRUSSELS) - European Union nations are far from agreement on measures to fight global warming and there is no guarantee a deal will be done by an EU summit in two weeks, a Polish minister warned on Thursday.
"We are very far from an agreement on the package on climate change and there is no garantee of success for the summit in December," Poland's European Affairs Minister Mikolaj Dowgielewicz told reporters in Brussels.
"It's difficult to be optimistic on the calender. We are as far from the agreement as we were in October," he said, referring to the last EU summit, when Poland and Italy threatened to veto the climate change package.
The EU has fixed a triple climate objective for 2020; a 20-percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels, bringing renewable energies up to 20 percent of the total, and an overall 20-percent cut in energy use.
But many countries are keen to protect their national industries from the costs the targets would involve, and the economic crisis has complicated the chances of an agreement.
"A number of countries are not ready to move an inch and try to delay the adoption of the package", including Scandinavian nations, the Netherlands, Germany and Britain, said Dowgielewicz.
The package narrowly avoided disaster in October, with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi only withdrawing their vetoes when some decisions were put off to the December 11-12 summit.
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