EU Presses Obama for 25%-40% Mid-Term Targets; Too Ambitious for Stern

Stavros Dimas, EU commissioner for environment, said he finds Obama's pledge to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050 and his support of a cap-and-trade system "encouraging," but urged America to make mid-term target commitments as ambitious as the EU. The EU has proposed developed nations curb emissions 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.  "Although President Obama is talking about leadership, leadership without an ambitious midterm target cannot be achieved," said Dimas.

During his first major policy speech last week, Todd Stern, Dept. of State Special Envoy on Climate Change, responded that the European proposal was "unnecessary and unfeasible" for the United States. He argued that pushing for such aggressive midterm targets is not required by science and would undermine the political goal. "I don't want to bring home a dead-on-arrival agreement," Stern said. "We tried that. It didn't do the world a lot of good." Stern said that not even the "greatest friends of this issue on Congress" are pushing for targets as ambitious as the EU proposal. Stern said he would like Congress to have a cap-and-trade bill "signed, sealed and delivered" for the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen later this year, but admitted it is "an extremely tall order." Currently, the Obama administration's mid-term target is 1990 levels by 2020. Read more at E&E (sub. req'd)