Brussels - Italy on Wednesday threw its weight behind Poland in a row over European Union plans to fight global warming, threatening to veto EU proposals unless they were radically changed. At a summit of EU leaders, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told colleagues that "I, too, will have to veto" the EU's proposals on climate change, adding in a press conference that "eight other (EU) states think the same as us."
And in a shock move, he called into question the whole principle of a 2007 EU agreement on limiting emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2, the gas most linked with global warming).
"Yes, we have to manage to limit CO2 emissions, but this must be done with a global agreement, because it's not conceivable that the EU should be the only one to do it when the other major producers of CO2 don't," he said.
In March 2007, when Berlusconi was leader of Italy's opposition, EU leaders pledged to cut the bloc's emissions of CO2, to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.
The EU's executive, the European Commission, in January proposed laws to put that pledge into effect, giving each country a target for cutting emissions based on its CO2 output in 2005.
But as Wednesday's summit began, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said that his country would veto an EU declaration on climate change if it included a commitment to reaching a deal in December, as the summit's presidency had proposed.
"Poland is ready to veto if there are attempts to force us to accept the climate-change package in the next month," he said.
Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, Poland's minister for Europe, backed up that message, saying "we certainly don't see the conditions for early agreement if we don't find better burden-sharing inside the package."
Ahead of the meeting, the French government, which currently holds the presidency of the EU, had proposed a summit declaration calling for "reaching an agreement (on the climate laws) in December."
That clause would not be legally binding, but it would put strong political pressure on member states to reach a deal in December.
"Please don't tell me that a package of proposals equal in consequences to what people call a third industrial revolution ... has to be approved in the space of 10 months," Dowgielewicz said.
Berlusconi's comment came on the same day as eight EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland, issued a joint statement criticizing the commission's proposals.
The eight EU newcomers want to be given credit for reducing their CO2 in the 1990s, at a time when their highly-polluting Communist-era industries collapsed.
The EU should "refrain from adopting measures that do not respect the differences of the member states' potential," especially in a time of "serious economic and financial difficulties," their joint statement said.
"The vast majority of the EU's greenhouse gas emission reductions have been achieved by less affluent member states at a very high social and economic cost, and it should be recognized," it said.
Any deal on the climate-change package will have to be reached by qualified majority voting, with 90 votes enough to block a deal. At present, the EU newcomers who wrote the letter command 85 votes.
But Italy's support would add a full 29 votes to their hand, giving them the prospect of torpedoing the entire package.
That is a prospect guaranteed to set the alarm bells ringing in Brussels, where officials say that EU leaders must agree to the climate-change proposals in December in order to bring them into force before European Parliament elections in June.
That, in turn, is vital because the EU sees its climate pledges as key to winning international backing for a global emissions-reduction contract, to be negotiated in Copenhagen in December 2009.
Poland is set to host the precursor to that meeting in December 2008.
The French proposals for a final declaration had already run into trouble as member states objected to what they saw as unacceptable language used in the draft version of the summit statement.
The original French draft had called on member states to sign up to a set of guidelines which they would follow when finalizing EU laws on how to hit the climate targets.
But following objections from EU members, the latest draft of the summit declaration, seen by Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, simply says that France "has presented, under its own responsibility, its guidelines for further work."
