European Union leaders on Thursday stuck to a December deadline for reaching a final deal on fighting climate change after Polish and Italian threats of a veto were won over, officials said, according to dpa. EU leaders meeting for a two-day summit in Brussels decided to "organize an intensified effort in the weeks to come to allow the council (of EU states) to decide in December 2008" on a package of laws aimed at fighting climate change, the summit statement said. However, the December decision will have to "take into account the specific situation" in each member state, the declaration said in a concession to the objections of Poland and Italy. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told journalists after the meeting that French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who chaired it, had promised him that any deal in December would be adopted by unanimity, rather than the usual qualified majority needed for environment laws - handing Warsaw a potential veto over proceedings. And the joint statement discarded a list of rules to govern the December talks which had been proposed by the French government, current holder of the EU's rotating presidency, in a bid to reinforce support for the package at a time of financial crisis. "The deadline on climate change is so important that we cannot use the financial crisis as a pretext to drop it," Sarkozy insisted after the meeting. In March 2007, EU leaders pledged to cut the bloc's emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2, the gas most linked with global warming), to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. The EU's executive, the European Commission, in January proposed laws to put that pledge into effect, giving each country a target for cutting emissions based on its CO2 output in 2005. But a row over the need to agree on the laws as soon as December threatened to torpedo the Brussels summit declaration, with Poland and Italy threatening to veto it if the deadline were not jettisoned. "We certainly don't see the conditions for early agreement if we don't find better burden-sharing inside the package ... Please don't tell me that a package of proposals equal in consequences to what people call a third industrial revolution has to be approved in the space of 10 months," Polish EU Minister Mikolaj Dowgielewicz said. Seven other EU newcomers from Central and Eastern Europe backed that call, accusing the commission of not taking their earlier efforts on climate change into account. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, meanwhile, argued that it would be too expensive to implement the laws given the present financial crisis. The final document approved by leaders sidestepped an immediate rupture by promising to take member states' concerns into account. But it sets up the EU for two months of intensive negotiation as the presidency and commission try to win over the sceptics. "Intricate work must be done ... so we can reach an agreement," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown admitted after the meeting. "We confirmed the date. Don't underestimate the difficulties that lie ahead," European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso warned. The commission and the French government now face the task of winning over at least nine countries before December without handing them so many concessions that other member states veto a compromise. The EU is desperate to reach a political deal on the detail of the laws by the end of the year so that it can bring them into force before global talks on fighting climate change in Copenhagen in December 2009. Poland is set to host a precursor to those talks this December.
