McKenna calls for binding agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions

This week's climate change summit in Kyoto would be successful only if it sets "firm, legally-binding targets" for industrialised countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, Dublin's Green Party MEP, Ms Patricia McKenna, said yesterday. "Anything else will be just more hot air," she told the Green Party conference in Dublin on climate change.

She accused the European Union of adopting a "quite sanctimonious" stance in the run-up to Kyoto by "arguing that it alone among the industrialised world is facing climate change head-on" when it was still paying £600 million a year in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.

Ms McKenna said the EU had also "capitulated" to intense lobbying by the European chemical industry in dropping HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons) from the basket of greenhouse gases which it has proposed to reduce by 15 per cent between now and 2010.

She suggested that no progress had been made on proposals for EU-wide energy taxes because such measures were opposed by all of the major industrial lobby groups and, in any case, required a unanimous decision by the Council of Ministers to be adopted.

"Throughout the industrialised world, multinational companies have undertaken an intensive lobbying campaign aimed at thwarting progress in Kyoto," she said. This was at its height in the US, with television commercials warning that cities would be hit by power cuts.

like a "hall of fame for polluters". It included such major corporations as Exxon, Chrysler, Dow Chemicals, Texaco, Union Carbide, General Motors, Ford and Chevron.

But she conceded that there was "some hope on the horizon". Last Thursday, for example, the European Commission had published a White Paper setting out plans to double the share of renewable energy in meeting EU energy demand from 6 per cent to 12 per cent by 2010.

The Commission's action plan would include installing 500,000 solar panels in schools, sports centres and public buildings, at a cost of £2.3 billion, as well as investing £7.7 billion in major wind farms and a further £3.8 billion in biomass CHP (combined heat and power) plants.

While saying it would be "churlish" of environmentalists not to welcome this initiative, she noted that the Commission "does not seem to have any intention at this stage" of reducing its subsidies to the fossil fuel and nuclear industries and switching them to renewable energy.

In Ireland, she pointed out that £21 million from the EU Structural Funds had been allocated to build "Europeat-1", a 120-megawatt peat-fired power station in the midlands which would become "one of the single biggest emitters of greenhouse gases in this country".

Ms Nuala Ahern, the Green Party MEP for Leinster, warned that the nuclear lobby in the EU had "seized climate change as a chance to promote nuclear power". However, apart from the accident risk and the "waste nightmare", nuclear plants needed 25 to 30 years of operation before they became economically viable.

Ms Sadhbh O'Neill, of Earthwatch, said "nine years of inaction" had passed since the 1988 Toronto conference which called for a 20 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. "Action is required now (at the Kyoto summit) and there must be no further delay," she declared.