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EP 02 – Combating climate change (submitted by the outgoing EB)

The Congress of JEF Europe

Recognises that the Kyoto protocol served as a first step for tackling the urging question of global warming, but fails to meet the challenge as drastically as needed in order to preserve the well-being of nations, future generations as well as the eco-system,

Noting that the failure of states like the USA or Australia to commit to supranational agreements and legislation to tackle global warming, together with the lack of enforcement mechanisms on the international level, serves as a disincentive for other states to take on obligation as well as living up to any obligations taken as they are put in a comparative disadvantage to the polluter,

Stresses that pollution is a negative externality that imposes non-compensated costs to other countries and should rightly be treated by the motto “the polluter pays” as in domestic law,

Further notes that the enforcement mechanisms that exist in domestic law to achieve this are lacking in international law, that is still characterized by voluntarism in the face of a lack of a global government and global enforcement institutions,

Welcomes Europe’s global leadership in reducing emissions and to press for binding emission targets, while highlighting that it is not enough for one region of the world to act and that binding, enforceable international mechanisms are needed,

Stresses that, in the light of the paramount danger posed to future generations as well as the habitats by global warming, a certain maximum emission level might be considered a pre-emptory norm or general principle of international law, hence giving binding effect also to states that are not signatories to any treaty;

Therefore JEF Europe

Urges the UN Bali conference to set out an ambitious Kyoto II protocol, that provides binding targets for the industrialised (annexed) countries as well as sufficient incentives for developing (non-annexed) countries to reduce emissions, as well as for all nations of the world, including China, India and the USA, to ratify Kyoto II,

In the long run demands the creating of a world legislature and judiciary with the power to impose universal rules in matters of international environmental law and further to have the mechanisms to enforce the compliance to this law,

In the medium term insist on the creation of enforcement mechanisms for achieving the binding targets of Kyoto, using for example trade penalties, as a natural continuation of transmitting global challenges from the domestic arena, where such enforcement mechanisms are in place, to a supranational level,

Asks the EU in the time until such an international enforcement mechanism is in place, to use its market power to enforce the principle of “the polluter pays” by endogenising the costs of third countries pollution trough mechanism such as an “excessive emission tariff”. The “penalty money” extracted in this way, that should be calculated in accordance with the Kyoto trading mechanism, should be reinvested in energy efficiency project in developing Non-Annex countries.