EU:The devil is in the detail of the EU's new energy policy, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
It is no coincidence that the European Commission should have published its new energy policy yesterday, just days after Russia - for the second time in the past 12 months - plugged a pipeline supplying Europe in a dispute with one of its nearest neighbours.
With so much of the EU's oil and gas now coming from Siberia, the drive for energy security is what's propelling the EU to reassess its policy in this vital area, even more so than the need to combat climate change - although there is an emerging symmetry in these twin objectives.
The hype from Brussels has been high. European Commission president José Manuel Barroso hailed the policy's focus on renewables as "a step change", while energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs predicted that Europe would now "lead the world to a new industrial revolution".
The proposed "binding target" of sourcing 20 per cent of the EU's overall energy mix from renewables by 2020 sounds ambitious. But as Friends of the Earth (FoE) warned, this will not be sufficient to achieve another aim of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent on 1990 levels.
"Scientific findings show that it simply won't be enough if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change," it said. "If EU governments confirm a target below 30 per cent at the upcoming EU summit, it will be a punch in the face for everyone already suffering from floods or droughts."
Although the policy also aims to create a properly functioning internal energy market (ESB, please note), FoE's Jan Kowalzig complained that it "leaves billions of euros of subsidies for fossil and nuclear energy untouched and fails to address the huge external costs to society of dirty energy".
As always, the devil is in the detail. Instead of specifying targets for each sector - electricity generation, transport, heating and cooling, etc - the commission is proposing only a global target of 20 per cent for renewables; only in the case of transport is a specific target set for biofuels.
By failing to do the same for other sectors, it was accused by the European Renewable Energy Council of "re-nationalising" effective EU legislation. "This energy package is another major step on the commission's road to becoming the world leader in pure announcements and lip-service," it said.
The elephant in the room, of course, is nuclear power. At present, it accounts for 30 per cent of the EU's electricity generation, and the commission's policy document says that if this proportion was to fall over time, it would have to be offset by the use of "other low-carbon energy sources". However, if member states were to take seriously the commission's firmly-held view that a drive for more energy efficiency across the board would save 20 per cent of current consumption, there wouldn't be any need for many to consider the fateful step of going down the nuclear route.
Indeed, if this target was achieved - for example, by better insulation of homes and workplaces - the EU as a whole would save €100 billion a year, with a corresponding reduction in its carbon dioxide emissions. However, energy efficiency is a lot less "sexy" than building new power stations.
Whatever happens, Ireland has a mountain to climb. As Green Party energy spokesman Eamon Ryan TD said yesterday, our greenhouse gas emissions are already some 24 per cent higher than they were in 1990 - so cutting them by a further 30 per cent by 2020 will be a major challenge.
Without a firm commitment by the Government to phase out fossil fuels in favour of developing a low-carbon economy, rather than simply purchasing carbon credits abroad, this challenge is unlikely to be met.