Europe

Since the European Council meeting last week, we now have a 20% target by 2020, or actually 3 targets: 20% reduction in greenhouse gasses, 20% primary energy savings against baseline and a binding 20% target for renewables for the EU. However, it's the member states, not the EU who will build this renewable capacity. The 20% renewable target is a grand aggregate of national targets, using various technologies, none of which have been defined except for the clause that national targets can be differentiated.

In the energy sector, we have prior experience with the EU Council adopting a binding target for its member states as a group through the burden-sharing agreement in the Kyoto protocol. According to the European Environmental Agency in its report on Greenhouse Gas Emission Trends, the EU is actually set on a course to meet its 8% Kyoto target by 2010, but if we look at the numbers, the EU-15 will have reduced its emissions by 4.6%, with a further 0.8% coming from sinks and 2.6% from acquiring emission reductions outside the EU, primarily through the Clean Development Mechanism. The fact that one can meet an 8% binding reduction target by an actual reduction of 4.6% demonstrates the flexibility offered by aggregate targets.