BRUSSELS, Belgium Leaders of the 27-country European Union pledged Thursday they will stick to a pricey plan for deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, saying the recent meltdown of financial markets must not deter efforts to combat global warming.
After presiding at a two-day EU summit, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that despite some misgivings about the cost, “climate change is so important that we cannot use the financial and economic crisis as a pretext for dropping it.”
The summit capped weeks of turmoil that devastated financial markets around the globe, sparked fears of a serious economic slowdown and revealed EU governments stumped for a coherent approach to protect banks, mortgage lenders and depositors.
Only in the last 10 days did the EU put together a $2.3 trillion emergency bailout for the banking sector that was approved at the summit.
Taking a cue from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the leaders called for a global approach to revamping the world’s financial system in hopes of preventing a repeat of the credit crisis.
Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Manual Barroso are to meet with U.S. President George W. Bush on Saturday at Camp David, Md., to lay the groundwork for a global summit to overhaul the financial system.
Ideas that the Europeans discussed included a meeting of the world’s major economic powers – including China, Russia and India – in November, possibly in New York, similar to the 1944 meeting in Bretton Woods, N.H., that laid down rules for international trade and financial relations.
Other issues the Europeans want discussed are supervision and regulation of markets, reductions in bank secrecy, early warning systems for detecting impending crises, and a framework for a rapid, co-ordinated international response to a crisis.
“We’re talking about a market economy with rules, that is the European model,” said Barroso.
For the first time, the leaders took a step toward EU supervision of banks – something Britain and other countries have resisted for years. They said national watchdogs need to meet at least once a month, and they also set up a financial crisis group to swap information.
When the summit started, Poland and six other eastern European members issued a surprise demand that the EU drop a December target for agreeing on details of the plan to bring about a 20 per cent cut in the bloc’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.
Italy joined the group in arguing that the costs of going green, combined with the looming economic downturn sparked by the turmoil in financial markets, was too much for their industries to bear.
“We want a package that will be tolerable for the poorer member states,” said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Sarkozy said he will try to forge a fair deal for sharing the burden, to avoid penalizing the bloc’s former Communist countries that depend largely on carbon-heavy coal for their power.
The EU climate package includes steps to force major polluters such as energy generators, steel makers and cement producers to pay billions into a cap-and-trade emissions program costing nearly $70 billion a year in polluter fees.
The plan is to enact the package in 2009 and draw the United States and other countries into a broad international program for dealing with global warming.
To help European industry at a time of economic slowdown, EU leaders said they will consider a stimulus package. Sarkozy pointed particularly to the auto industry, which is demanding a $54.5 billion bailout fund.
“Can you ask the European car industry to provide clean cars, change the whole industrial apparatus, without giving them a helping hand?” Sarkozy said.
He said European car makers might need an injection of state cash, similar to the U.S. government’s $25 billion low-interest credit line for General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC announced last month.
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