The middle of a recession is not the time to be announcing cuts that may well effect the economic competitiveness of the Economy. Some areas of Europe – particularly Eastern Europe, have been very badly hit by the recession. These countries cannot afford to have all the extra costs to business that extra environmental regulation will bring. There will be costs in terms of administration and accounting for emissions, extra costs in actually going green, changing to using renewable power as the main energy source, reducing CO2 emissions from factories, cars, lorries etc. This means that countries that have not opted to reduce emissions will be able to produce the same goods for a cheaper price so undermining the competitiveness of that country in those products. This in turn would mean that more production goes abroad so causing the CO2 emissions to increase again.

The European Union currently only emits 13.8% of global CO2 emissions, this is likely to reduce substantially as the EU’s emissions continue to fall while the developing world’s continues to sharply rise. With Europe contributing so little to future emissions it does not matter if Europe makes faster and deeper cuts because no matter the size of the cut made by Europe this will be more than compensated for by the rise in emissions elsewhere.