Abridged speech of José Manuel Borroso, President of the European Commission Speech, at the Project Syndicate conference on Copenhagen

Despite the recent efforts in New York, Pittsburgh and in Bangkok, I remain very worried by the prospects of a deadlock. Continuing business as usual means catastrophic climage chage of this century and we need an agreement based on science that limits average global warming to 2% degree Celsius. This means global emissions of greenhouse gases will need to peak before 2020 and by 2050 must be reduced to at leas half their 1990 levels.

This is a moral issue and we have no right to impose pain and the cost of climate change on future generations. We cannot limit ourselves to the understanding of the moral complexity but must push it to those who have the political responsibility to take on the solutions, for this is not the moral imperative but also of immense economic opportunity. Europe has committed to doubling its share of renewable energy by 20% n 2020. This will in turn generate 90 billion Euros, creating some 700,000 new jobs and reduce oil and gas import to round about 45 billion Euros. The Strategic Energy Technology (SET) plan will produce a low carbon competition in the next couple of decades. The green growth is not a pipe dream but the reality. The carbon emission is now less than half of the US and the economy is moving to a new paradigm.

The mistaken view that some will stand back while others take the brunt of emissions reduction will have to be faced as the people construe that the industrialised world is responsible to climate change. The answer is that even if the industrialised world reduced its emissions to zero today and the developing continue to do business as usual we would still reach the dangerous level of 650 parts per million (PPM) by 2050. A truly global deal must commute everyone at the same level. But we are not asking the developing countries to put in the same commitments as we are but must take on the binding economy that targets CO 2 reduction. We need everyone to table offers at the outer limits of their political constraints to be as ambitions as they can. We need to translate their domestic actions to an overall agreement. The developed world must also be ready to put money to help finance the additional mitigation effort pursued by developing countries. By 2020 the developing countries will roughly need 100 billion Euros annually to tackle the climate change and some of them will have to be financed by emerging economies of the developing countries.

In the climate discussion there is no plan B either we succeed or we face plan F failure. The meeting in Kobenhavn represent the best chance, collectively, to shift trajectory, into a track which will keep the global warming below 2 degree Celsius