Sydney - Australia and the European Union have agreed to hold talks twice a year on energy security and climate change, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Monday. The agreement was reached in Canberra after a meeting between Downer and European Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner.
Australia and the EU are often at loggerheads over how to deal with the greenhouses gases that cause climate change. Along with the United States, Australia refuses to ratify the Kyoto Protocol that entails accepting binding targets for abating greenhouse gases.
The EU has committed to cutting emissions and is already engaged in the carbon trading that the United States and Australia have so far rejected.
"There have been, of course, arguments between Australia and Europe over the years on this issue of climate change in particular," Downer told reporters after the meeting. "I think we can work much more effectively together in the future than perhaps we have succeeded in doing in the past."
Ferrero-Waldner said developed countries had to play a leading role in cutting greenhouse gases but that "developing countries also have to accompany us in this process."
She said Australia and the EU could together develop low-emission technologies. "For instance, a near-zero, clean-coal carbon plant, which we will try to develop and which then could be a model, for instance, for China ... but also for other developing countries," Ferrero-Waldner said.
