Leaked documents seen by the Guardian this week (http://tinyurl.com/4643b9) suggest that the EU council could use the current economic crisis as an excuse for reneging on previous climate change targets and commitments. The council is set to meet this week and will discuss whether to sidestep proposals to increase the EU’s target of a 20% cut in emissions by 2020 to 30% (which will come into effect if a global deal is signed).

The question is why this is even being considered in the first place, and what consequences could we face as a result? Is it not more rational to see this as another exploitation of the public’s fear over the economic crisis (which on a daily basis takes on newly mythical levels of potency in mainstream media reporting), to abandon something which is deeply neccessary but fundamentally politically difficult?

Is the ‘extreme situation’ of the financial crisis not simply being used to reconfigure our notions of what is acceptable in terms of government policy and business practice, and to legitimise failure to meet crucial targets?

Presumably the key tenet of this reasoning is that in the current economic climate we cannot afford to let energy costs increase any further, as people struggle to pay their heating bills this winter. This is a perfectly reasonable concern and must be responsibly addressed.

The idea is that if the climate change commitment is relaxed then EU countries could go ahead with plans to increase coal power generation capacities which in turn would provide cheaper energy so that household bills could be kept down. In theory this would be an effective (and probably popular) short term solution to the economic issue. It all seems perfectly simple and logical…

However the problem is that these exceptional circumstances are acting as an excuse to forget the core facts of climate change - that the cheaper fossil fuel solution brings devastating long-term consequences, something that is now commonly understood in the public domain as indisputable fact. To revert to such solutions essentially amounts to saying; ‘renewables are expensive, let’s just use coal and forget about the environmental issues - it is an economic crisis after all…’

Instead of basically looking at ways to take the easy way out, the EU should be facilitating a more adequate solution. Why not look at subsidy package to help ease the impact of rising household bills over the next few years to quite literally ‘buy’ time to make a significant improvement to renewables capacity?

This whole measure of avoiding targets would no doubt be an effective way of maintaining the status quo (or roughly thereabouts) but the whole problem is that while potentially easier (both for governments and populations) this represents a childish attempt to bury our heads in the sand and hope the problems we face will somehow not be here the day after tomorrow.

Even the 30% cut which is proposed as part of this deal is considered by many experts to be an absolute minimum (and in almost every case only just a stepping stone to further reductions) - so to start wavering at this early stage poses a real threat to a long term process in its infancy. The EU as a leading economic and political institution in the world should surely be focused on leading by example rather than destabalising an essential global effort.

As I write this the meetings will surely be commencing in Brussels for what promises to be a crucial chapter in the future of EU climate change policy and indeed of the world. When the US obstinately obstructed the Kyoto agreement it damaged the entire effort to a degree that set progress back a good few years - for the EU to do similarly now, remembering not only Kyoto but also the increased significance of such a move at this even later stage, would be verging on the criminal were it not so frustratingly and mindlessly short-sighted. We’ll see what decision the next few days brings from Brussels…

Dejan Levi