And the Moment We've All Been Waiting For...

The EU report Eric mentions below was released today. Reuters reports,

The European Commission has announced what it says are the world's most ambitious targets for fighting climate change, proposing the bloc cut greenhouse gases by at least 20 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels.

And in a global game of "I'll jump if you jump,"

Brussels also challenged developed nations around the world to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2020, a move the EU would match if others joined in.

In addition to addressing climate change concerns the vision for the common energy policy

seek[s] to ease dependence on foreign suppliers and reduce the dominance of big utilities.

Predictably, France and Germany had something to say about that and there are a couple of options in the report.

Also predictable was criticism from the no-solutions gang. Jan Kowalzig, a spokesman from Friends of the Earth Europe, said

Scientific findings show that it simply won't be enough for the EU to only reduce CO2 emissions by 20 percent by 2020 if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change

These are the same people that oppose nuclear power. The EU is already going to miss its target of reducing carbon emissions 8% from 1990 levels by 2012. Yet the gang wants a bigger reduction in carbon emissions AND they want to phase out nuclear power. It just doesn't make sense.

While it doesn't give targets for nuclear generation, the Commission's report said

shutting nuclear reactors will make cutting greenhouse gas emissions harder

You betcha.

The report also proposed that, even though the current generation target of 12% renewables by 2012 will likely not be met, renewable sources make up 20% of the EU's energy mix by 2020. To do that with intermittent sources like solar or wind, they will surely have to spend a lot of money to improve the transmission and distribution system as last year's blackout demonstrated. In Alberta, Canada $1 billion is already being spent to upgrade the transmission system in order to handle just 900 MW of wind power.

In any case, I wonder if this opens the door for restarts of nuclear power plants that the EU recently forced to close?