EU Trade Chief-Designate Rejects Carbon Border Tariffs
span style=”font-size:85%;”(Reuters – Pete Harrison and Darren Ennis)/spanbr /br /The European Union should not impose border tariffs on goods from countries that fail to cut back their climate-damaging emissions, the EU’s trade commissioner-designate said on Tuesday.br /br /“I don’t think that’s the right approach myself,” Karel de Gucht told members of the European Parliament, which will vote whether to approve the European Commission line-up on January 26. “It’s an approach that will run into many practical problems.”br /br /Europe has pledged to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide, which are blamed for climate change, to a fifth below 1990 levels over the next decade. But manufacturers worry that the cost of cleaning up factories and power-generators will make their products more expensive and less attractive than cheap imports from rivals in India and China.br /br /Some politicians, particularly in France, have said that imposing carbon tariffs on goods from carbon-intensive manufacturing regions would level out the playing field. Read more a href=”http://in.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idINLDE60B19F20100112″here/a.
Date: January 12, 2010
