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European Commission admits biofuel problems, but clings to target
"Europe's environment chief has admitted that the EU did not foresee the problems raised by its policy to get 10% of Europe's road fuels from plants."
Today, EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas told the BBC that "[w]e have seen that the environmental problems caused by biofuels and also the social problems are bigger than we thought they were. So we have to move very carefully. We have to have criteria for sustainability, including social and environmental issues, because there are some benefits from biofuels." Apparently, the 2020 10% target is not subject to discussion.
Read the full article here.
Our take: some of the EU member states, amongst which the UK and the Netherlands, have already put effort into developing sustainability criteria. These countries have also commenced developing policy strategies to enable them to guarantee adherence to these criteria.
However, there are still various hurdles to be taken before sustainability criteria can and will be set by the European Union as a whole. One of the major challenges is to reconcile imposition of sustainability criteria with the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime. Another is to find EU-wide agreement on a basic set of criteria, which is not to be expected on a very short term. In the meantime, biofuel demand is increasing. To be continued...
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