EU 'sell-out' is massive blow for renewable energy plans

Hopes that world leaders would agree to boost renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, were dealt a devastating blow yesterday when European Union negotiators abandoned attempts to press for it.

Confidential conference documents seen by The Independent reveal that the EU – which has led attempts for an increase in renewable energy – is proposing that it rises by only a single percentage point worldwide over this entire decade.

The development endangers any remaining prospect that the World Summit on Sustainable Development will make progress in protecting the environment and reducing poverty, just two days after it opened. It is also a humiliating personal rebuff for Tony Blair.

Green groups hope that ministers will overrule the European Commission officials who put it forward and are calling on Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Michael Meacher, the Environment Minister, to lead the way.

Agreeing ambitious targets for renewable energy has long been seen as one of the touchstones for the success of the summit, which will bring together 104 world leaders next week. So far delegations from 190 of the world's 195 countries have arrived, making it the biggest conference the world has seen.

Boosting solar, wind and other clean forms of energy is widely seen to be one of the main ways of fulfilling the summit's twin objectives of tackling world poverty and reversing the degradation of the environment. They are accepted to be the best way of bringing electricity to the one third of the world's people who burn wood and dung, which give off toxic chemicals that kill more than 2 million people a year. Renewables are also one of the keys to reducing emissions of carbon dioxide that are the main cause of global warming.

Two years ago Tony Blair persuaded the leaders of the world's richest nations to launch an initiative to bring renewable energy to a billion people by 2010. However, President Bush vigorously opposed setting any targets for increasing renewables. More surprisingly, Opec countries succeeded in persuading the Third World to oppose them too. The EU was left as an isolated advocate.

Its proposal yesterday was that renewables should be increased to "at least 15 per cent of global total primary energy supply by 2010". A confidential EU paper says the present level is "in the range of 13.5 to 14 per cent". It justifies the increase as going beyond, "albeit modestly, a mere stablisation".

The proposal goes on to suggest that industrialised countries should "aim at an increase of the share of renewable energy sources in the total primary energy supply by at least two percentage points by 2010 relative to 2000". This is a tiny increase, far below many individual targets in Western countries.

Green groups are also angry because, as yet another confidential document makes clear, the EU's definition of renewable energy includes hydroelectric power and the burning of wood and other "biomass". The document admits that hydropower is "controversial" because the building of dams has made people homeless and damaged the environment. And it also acknowledges that burning biomass is "leading to deforestation" and will increase global warming.

Jennifer Morgan, of WWF International, says that this will encourage countries to build more big dams and allow the burning of wood to go unchecked.

She said: "Ministers must stop this process and ensure that this summit produces a real renewable energy target that will benefit people and the planet."

Philip Clapp, of the US's National Environmental Trust, said the EU's position was now almost identical to that of the Bush administration.