EU lawmakers recommended on Thursday including a call for global targets on renewable energy and energy efficiency in the European Union’s negotiating position for next year’s Rio+20 sustainability summit in June.
“We should aim at globally binding targets,” said Karl-Heinz Florenz, a member of the European Parliament who helped draft the resolution.
In April, a U.N. panel of climate scientists said the world could get up to almost 80 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2050, given the right policies to shift consumption away from fossil fuels such as coal and oil.
Lawmakers meeting in the French city of Strasbourg said the bloc should push for an end to “environmentally harmful subsidies” by 2020 — including for biofuels.
The resolution expressed the hope that a proposed EU financial transaction tax would be adopted globally, and the proceeds used to fight the impact of global warming in developing countries.
The Parliament has the right of veto on all international agreements to which the EU agrees, and the bloc’s executive will have to take account of its position when finalizing the negotiating position for the summit.
The Rio+20 summit on sustainable development will take place 20 years after the first Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which is regarded as a milestone in raising environmental awareness around the world.
