BRUSSELS, April 19 (UPI) -- The European Union's top climate official called for an energy tax to boost the bloc's climate protection efforts.
EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard told Monday's Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung that "energy taxes are among the instruments we should use for climate protection in the EU, because that's how energy consumption is reduced."
Denmark's Hedegaard, who led the U.N. climate negotiations in Copenhagen last year, said instead of imposing high work-related taxes, which threaten European companies competing with foreign firms "it would be much smarter to install a system that includes a top tax rate for areas threatening the common good, such as a excessive energy consumption."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to introduce a carbon emissions tax as part of a plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions, combat climate change and become less dependent on fuel imports.
Drafted as a tax on transport and household fuels, the measure was due to come into effect this year but was scrapped by Sarkozy last month after significant headwind for his reform plans.
Paris said it would postpone the tax in order not to damage French companies' competitiveness because other European nations aren't planning a similar tax.
France and Italy last week pressed the EU to consider a carbon tax on imports from countries who are not doing enough to stop climate change.
In a letter to European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi urged Brussels to "specify without reservation the conditions in which such an adjustment mechanism could be set up."
Their letter pointed out that the commission is due to report in June on carbon pollution by key industries and make recommendations.
"It would be unacceptable if the ambitious efforts already agreed by the EU to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ... were compromised by carbon leaking due to lacking or insufficient action by certain third countries," the letter reads.
The European Union does have joint goals: Brussels in 2008 agreed on ambitious climate protection and renewable energy targets.
The EU aims to cut its greenhouse gases by 20 percent, boost the share of renewables in the energy mix to 20 percent and reduce energy consumption by 20 percent -- all by 2020.
The 27-member bloc will shoot for a 30-percent emissions cut if the world's other big polluters agree to their own binding reductions at the end of a U.N. process to agree to an ambitious successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012.
