EU Environment Ministers Agree on Greenhouse Gases CutThe 15-country European Union's environment ministers agreed November 7 to take the same stance on the reduction of greenhouse gases at an international meeting that starts in the Hague next week.The ministers demanded tough rules for compliance with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to cut greenhouse gases, French Environment Minister Dominique Voynet said at a news conference. The EU's core demands were to ensure that countries make most of their emissions cuts through domestic action rather than other "flexible mechanisms," to impose firm sanctions against countries that miss their targets, and to limit the use of so-called "carbon sinks" -- using forests, which absorb carbon, to account for some of a country's target. The EU ministers had decided on the fundamental points on which the EU would negotiate at the Hague meeting and how far they might go in tolerating other countries' positions, Voynet said, whose country holds the current EU rotating presidency in the second half of the year. "We haven't been looking at fall-back positions or concessions, but we did look at how (others') positions correspond most closely to our own," she said. "We won't give our agreement to any scenario that puts into doubt the ecological importance of the protocol," she said. Under the framework of a United Nations treaty on climate change in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, industrialized countries undertook to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5 percent of 1990 levels by 2008-2012. The two-week Hague meeting that starts next Monday will be attended by environment ministers and other representatives of countries and areas from all over the world to decide how the system works to ensure emission reduction. |
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