European Union negotiations on climate change stalled five weeks before the U.N. conference in Copenhagen.
Europe has consistently pressed for developing nations to switch to clean energy and for internationally monitored reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
“We can now look the rest of the world in the eyes and say ‘we have done our job. We are ready for Copenhagen’,” the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, said Friday after E.U. leaders papered over differences on how to finance environmental policies in the developing world, the NY Times reported.
But Europeans are becoming uneasy. The E.U.’s adoption of goals to cut the output of carbon dioxide by at least 20 percent by 2020, have raised the expectations for a global treaty set to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
Scores of activists on blocked Wednesday the main entrance to the venue of key UN climate talks in Barcelona, demanding even heavier cuts in greenhouse gases.
“If the climate were a bank, it would have been saved,” a group demanding emissions cuts said in a statement released ahead of the protest.
The group, called "The Climate Is Not For Sale," demanded emission cuts by industrial countries of up to 40 per cent by 2020, the Daily Nation said.
The United States, which never ratified or implemented the 1997 Kyoto deal, still demonstrates reluctance to follow the goals. China and India refuse to accept binding by international curbs on carbon emissions. Copenhagen has the risk of becoming a political agreement based largely on voluntary national pledges. And even that is uncertain.
