An initial investigation of the EU's 2020 climate change package and its potential domestic impact

As the world’s premiere supranational political and economic organization, the European Union’s (EU’s) symbolic power with respect to action on climate change and global warming is immense. In this regard, the EU’s 2020 Climate Change Package, introduced by the European Commission on January 23rd, 2008 represents an important and historical step in the direction of responding to the climate challenge and potentially even in the direction of renewing the original Kyoto Protocol signed by the EU and several other states in 1997. At the same time, the EU’s 2020 Climate Change Package represents a genuine challenge to the economic, political and social resources of individual EU member states. In particular, for the EU’s less advanced new member states (NMSs), the 2020 Climate Change Package effectively raises the question whether the goals of economic convergence with the more advanced EU member states are compatible. Given the record of the more advanced EU member states under the Kyoto Protocol framework, very few of the old member states (OMSs) have so far been able to demonstrate any effective “decoupling” of economic growth and rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. More distressing still, in seeming disregard of the EU’s Kyoto Protocol, the former “cohesion” countries (Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain) along with Austria, Italy and the Netherlands have all dramatically increased their CO2 and/or GHG emissions through 2005