NewEurope, July 18, 2010
Tim Rayner and Andrew Jordan
Much has been written about the debacle at the Copenhagen climate summit last December, where the EU found itself sidelined during the endgame. The psychological blow to the EU’s self-image as a global ‘leader’ in climate change diplomacy was considerable. Since then, the Union has been bogged down in a messy internal debate over how far it should continue to ‘lead by example’, when others are evidently so reluctant to follow. Throughout the rest of this year, in the run up to the next meeting in Mexico, it will wrestle with the conundrum of whether its current target of a 20% reduction by 2020 (on 1990 levels) should be raised unilaterally to 30%.