EU climate policy said costly with tiny benefits

ATHENS (Reuters) - European Union plans to fight climate change until 2020 will cost hundreds of billions of dollars but give scant benefits, a study commissioned by a self-styled "Skeptical Environmentalist" said on Thursday.

"This is the wrong way forward," Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician who heads the Copenhagen Consensus Center, said of EU plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

The EU's 2020 climate policies will cost between 116 and 210 billion euros ($142-$257 billion) a year, or up to 1.3 percent of EU gross domestic product, according to the study by Richard Tol, Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin.

Benefits would range from just 7 billion to 102 billion euros a year, according to the 39-page report.

Ranges are wide because it is hard to assess risks, for instance, of a melt of Antarctica that would push up sea levels, or a shift in Asian monsoons affecting rice prices. Or tourism in Europe might shift if the Mediterranean region gets drier.

"The benefits will be very, very low," Lomborg told Reuters, highlighting the 7 billion euros of least return. Lomborg won fame with his 1998 book "The Skeptical Environmentalist."

If continued until 2100, he said EU policies stressing a shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energies would have almost zero impact on rising world temperatures. He and Tol instead advocated more research into green technology to slow warming.

HEATWAVES

By contrast, an EU Commission study last month said costs of meeting EU 2020 climate targets had fallen to 48 billion euros a year from 70 billion estimated two years ago. Economic crisis has cut emissions, mainly from the use of fossil fuels.

And in 2007, a panel of U.N. climate scientists said costs of a tough goal of limiting a rise in world temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial times would cost less than 0.12 percent of global GDP a year until 2050.

That study saw big benefits such as averting more heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising sea levels. The EU says a shift to cleaner wind or solar power will cut oil import bills, reduce air pollution and so cut health spending.

The EU's climate and energy package also aims to raise the share of renewables in total energy use to 20 percent and improving energy efficiency by 20 percent, both by 2020.

EU countries have promised to deepen emissions cuts to 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 if other nations take tough action. Lomborg said that was like stepping on the accelerator of a car going in the wrong direction.

U.N. talks on a new binding U.N. climate deal have made little progress this year after a U.N. summit in Copenhagen in December fell short of a new treaty. Economic downturn in many nations has discouraged tougher action.

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