EU WILL BLOCK POLISH EFFORT TO DILUTE CO2 REDUCTIONS



Poland has brought a lawsuit to try to get the EU to make the emissions policies subject to the unanimous consent provisions of the European Treaty. No one outside of Poland gives this lawsuit much chance. The new Polish Government also has pushed for loopholes in the climate provisions for EU CO2 reductions by 2030.

The creative use of the forestry provisions threatened to allow Member States to create paper credits for CO2 reduction that basically scammed the system. The use of planting trees to create credits under the Kyoto Protocol was widely criticized by the Left. LINK. New EU earlier proposals have also drawn criticism: "But Kyoto’s accounting rules and its use of a ‘business as usual’ baseline have left it open to abuse. By overstating their “business as usual” logging, governments can scoop up millions of euros worth of carbon credits by simply not hitting their timber-felling targets." EuroActiv.com. Studies have also shown that, for Poland, the cost of re-forestation is likely to be higher that the cost of switching the energy production to cleaner technologies.

The latest proposal from the European Commission, however, seems to have caught the game in advance and may frustrate this effort, by both the terms of the provisions defining when forests can count and by a cap on the use of this form of credits to mean 2030 numbers. "The Commission will introduce tougher accounting rules and will not allow forest management to be taken into account in a bid to head off abuse." EuroActiv, supra.

The lack of a clear understanding of the economics of energy as well as a certain naivety about its leverage in Brussels has continued to plague the new government's initiatives.

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