THIRD PETERSBERG CLIMATE DIALOGUE TOOK PLACE IN BERLIN

Representatives from 30 governments representing the different groupings in international climate negotiations met in Berlin recently in order to discuss various topics related to international climate negotiations.

 

The Petersberg Climate Dialogue first took place in 2010 following a disappointing outcome from the 2009 Climate summit in Copenhagen with the aim of sup-porting official negotiations and create a forum through which political challenges can be accompanied with practical experiences in implementing climate protec-tion policies. This year’s main theme is the so called ambition gap displayed in the discrepancies between climate goals to date and a 2º Celsius compatible emis-sions path.

 

Other important topics include the transformation to a low emission economy and the new global agreement that shall be negotiated until 2015 and is meant to come in effect in 2020.

 

German Chancellor Merkel made it clear that there is no room for discrepancies between goals and actions as in the long-term, doing nothing will be far more ex-pensive than enacting timely measures. On the whole, Merkel’s speech can be taken as a sign that she re-mains committed to pushing the international climate protection policies forward. Critics of the German gov-ernment point to hypocrisy as attempts at the European level to hinder strict environmental criteria for the auto-mobile industry and watering down of energy efficiency guidelines is not in keeping with the self-proclaimed vanguard role in climate protection matters.

 

Polish power plants receive free emissions rights allocations

As already reported last week, six EU member states had already received European Commission approval for free-of-charge EUAs for their power plants. Now the Commission has also approved Poland’s request. This increases the overall volume of free-of-charge EUAs for power plants by 404.7 million to 72.9 million.

However, there are some conditions to the approval. Poland must undertake some adjustments in terms of technical aspects and tackles some irregularities re-garding some plants included in their application. Po-land has one year to deal with these matters

This means that Hungary is the only country whose application has not yet bee approved by the Commis-sion. This is expected to take place in coming days.