Climate change and the EU: from leadership to the risk of irrelevance

Abstract

The process of climate change emerges at the beginning of the 21st century as one of the main threats that must confront the International Community. The emission of the greenhouse gases has taken as a consequence the acceleration of the global warming, affecting, direct or indirectly, all the earthly ecosystems. The predictions  realized by the experts, in particular the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warn with clarity on the terrible consequences of the phenomenon. Thus, there is an urgent and pressing need to tackle the ways of fighting and reducing the climate change. To this effect, the EU has acquired a key position being in the van of the development of an acquis communautaire to fight climate change having assumed also a leader’s role in the search of international instruments that could replace the Protocol of Kyoto. 
The incorporation of the fight against the climate change like a new material element in the Treaty of Lisbon (probably unnecessary existing currently enough legal base in the  EC Treaty in force) in the context of the huge difficulties in replacing the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, reveals in our opinion, that the fight against climate change is becaming one of the values and signs of identity of the new Europe, especially in a key period of redefinition, when all current circumstances are completely different from those existing at the beginning of the process of European construction. 
At the same time that the EU was developing an innovative and courageous internal set of rules, the EU had been playing a leading role in climate summits. Nevertheless, since the Copenhagen Summit in 2009 the EU is increasingly alone in defending a binding legal agreement to the point that currently the burden of the extension of Kyoto 2 negotiated in Doha is exclusively borne by the EU.