Wijkman is encouraged by ongoing developments in the United States, and said the House of Representatives had strengthened a bill presented by President Barack Obama earlier this year.
"The Waxman-Markey bill is very good as a first step," he said. However, he regretted that the draft US law had not adopted more ambitious targets for 2020, saying that a planned 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 seemed more important for US lawmakers at the moment.
"Unfortunately they are wrong, because emissions stay in the atmosphere for such a long period of time. If we accumulate another 25-35 ppm [parts per million] in the next ten years, it's going to be very, very difficult to take them out of the atmosphere again," Wijkman said.
He further warned that none of the proposals currently on the table – whether in the US or elsewhere - were good enough to keep global warming under the critical 2°C threshold.
Wijkman was particularly disappointed with the EU's failure to tackle the issue of financing adaptation, technology cooperation and forest protection in developing countries. At their spring summit in March, EU leaders postponed their decision on the issue, provoking strong criticism from environmentalists (EurActiv 23/03/09).
Final hour agreement 'not the way to go'
Wijkman argued that it takes time to build trust for the kind of agreement the global community will try to hammer out in Copenhagen in December, suggesting that the process should be more organised.
"We cannot deliver or offer things in the final hour," Wijkman stressed, arguing that if the preconditions for a good agreement are not there at the UN climate meeting in December, the deal should be postponed.
"Nobody is interested in locking the world into a ten-year agreement which does not meet the requirements," he said.
His comments starkly contrasted those of Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Speaking to EurActiv in an interview last week, Pachauri warned that that postponing the agreement might break the momentum and lead to further complications (EurActiv 01/04/09).
EU growth agenda still off balance
Looking back on his ten years in the European Parliament, Wijkman said there was still too little understanding in the EU that the conventional growth agenda is not sustainable, even within his own party group, the centre-right EPP-ED.
"To assume that society is making progress just because consumption is going up is utterly flawed," he said, explaining that it is a matter of looking not only at climate-related problems, but the depletion of natural resources in general.
"The Lisbon agenda is too narrow. It must be merged with a sustainable development agenda," Wijkman argued, stressing that energy and resource efficiency would have to become priorities.
Wijkman said that although he would miss the dynamic environment of the European Parliament, he would continue to work on the environmental and climate-related issues to which he has devoted the past 25 years of his life, not least as vice-president of the Club of Rome.
