Europe should impose a unilateral cut in greenhouse gas emissions of 30% by 2020, according to climate economist Sir Nicholas Stern.

Under the EU’s agreement about how to divide up the cuts that would spell a UK reduction of 42% by 2020, compared to 1990 levels.
Lord Stern described this as “challenging but possible”.
He said it would put the UK at the forefront of a low-carbon “industrial revolution”.
The EU has promised to increase its proposed 20% cut to 30% if there is a strong agreement at next week’s climate conference in Copenhagen – described by Lord Stern as the most important international gathering since World War II.
He said that China and the US had already made concrete offers for the meeting, so the EU should increase the pressure with an ambitious target.
He said that would mean investing between 1% and 2% of national wealth into creating a low-carbon economy, and suggested that the UK government should put extra taxes on high-emitting sectors like aviation and shipping to raise more cash to fund the low-carbon revolution.
But the latest analysis from his team suggests that even the strongest agreement likely at Copenhagen would give the world only a “50-50 chance” of avoiding a level of emissions that the majority of scientists believe could cause catastrophic and irreversible effects.
Falling short
Lord Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, explained that to avoid emissions levels associated with a 2C rise, greenhouse gases needed to drop from 47 billion tonnes in 2010 to about 44 billion tonnes in 2020.
They would then need to plunge to much less than 20 billion tonnes in 2050. He said pledges from nations so far fell short of the 2020 target by about two billion tonnes.

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