Brussels - European Union countries must improve their energy efficiency and stop using the financial crisis as an excuse not to reduce pollution, the bloc's top officials said Thursday. "The financial crisis has not diminished the risks to our planet deriving from climate change," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in Brussels.
EU governments have committed themselves to ambitious climate change and energy targets known as "20-20-20."
These involve cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent of their 1990 levels, improving energy efficiency by 20 per cent, and boosting the bloc's share of renewable energy by 20 per cent - all by 2020.
But current data suggests that the EU will fail to achieve its energy-saving goal unless additional steps are taken. And planned CO2 emission cuts have come under fire from Italy, Poland and other member states, who complain that they will damage industry at a time of economic crisis.
The head of the EU executive hit back at critics on Thursday, telling them that achieving climate change targets were more urgent than ever.
"One of the lessons that can be drawn from the financial crisis is that maybe we should all have acted before," Barroso said. "Let's not make the same mistake" with climate change.
At the same time, the EU continues to rely on oil and gas imports from potentially unreliable partners in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. More worrying still, eight of the EU's 27 member states totally rely on just one supplier for all their gas needs.
"We must break the vicious energy cycle of increased energy consumption and increased imports," Barroso said, noting that 42 per cent of the EU's current gas imports come from Russia.
His comments followed a stark warning from the International Energy Agency, which on Wednesday said current global trends in energy supply and consumption were "patently unsustainable - environmentally, economically and socially."
To address those problems, the commission unveiled a series of proposals being submitted to national governments. They include extending popular energy-efficiency labels to industrial products as well as buildings and tyres, and creating more off-shore wind farms.
The first idea builds on the success of existing energy efficiency A-G labels now found on consumer goods such as fridges and washing machines, with A-labelled electronic products requiring less electricity to function. The commission now wants to extend their use to industrial products such as elevators, and even buildings.
Officials note that old buildings guzzle up to 60 litres of heating oil per square metre floor area per year. Newer, energy-efficient structures, by contrast, can consume less than 5 litres of heating oil per square metre.
Barroso and his staff have long argued that fighting climate change also makes economic sense.
And to prove their point, they said Thursday that renovating houses to make them more energy efficient would result in 25 billion euros in annual energy cost savings by 2020, at a cost of 8 billion euros per year.
Energy-efficiency labels on industrial goods would also guide governments when deciding what products to buy for the public sector, or which should benefit from tax breaks or other incentives.
The commission is also worried that the bloc's current networks will soon be unable to guarantee an adequate supply of energy to homes, offices and factories. Moreover, meeting the EU's energy and climate targets will also require more investments.
In all, its experts predict that governments will need to spend up to 1 trillion euros on new networks and on generation capacity and a further 150 billion on gas networks between now and 2030.
In order to meet the EU's 20 per cent target on renewable energy, the commission also called on governments to invest more in offshore wind energy farms. Windmills at sea have the dual advantage of enjoying stronger winds and of reducing discomfort for citizens, officials said.
"We have to invest and diversify. The proposals adopted today represent an unequivocal statement of the commission's desire to guarantee secure and sustainable energy supplies, and should help us deliver on the crucial 20-20-20 climate change targets," Barroso said.
