Dusseldorf, Germany (CNSNews.com) – As European leaders prepare to attend the G20 meeting in Washington later this week, they are stepping up pressure on President-elect Obama to support their plans on both international finance and climate change.
 
The meeting is the first of a series of summits proposed by President Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the president of the European Union’s executive Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, to address the global financial crisis.
 
The E.U. is planning sweeping reforms for the international financial system, involving a total overhaul of the 60-year old International Monetary Fund (IMF). The proposals include stricter regulation of hedge funds and cross-border financial institutions, a clampdown on tax havens. and a global “early warning” system.
 
European governments have already pledged roughly two trillion euros ($2.5 trillion) in cash injections, bank deposit guarantees, interbank loan coverage and partial or full nationalizations in an attempt to minimize consumers’ concerns about the crisis.
 
Alongside these wide ranging proposals, officials say the E.U. remains committed to aggressive investment in measures to combat climate change, and – encouraged by Obama’s election – will be aiming to secure increased U.S. support.
 
Saturday’s meeting aims to emulate the Bretton Woods conference in the latter stages of World War II, which established the IMF and the World Bank Group with the objective of preventing a repeat of the 1930s worldwide economic meltdown.
 
Expected participants include leaders of the Group of Eight leading industrialized countries – the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia – together with those of emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa, as well as Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Australia.
 
White House press secretary Dana Perino said no concrete solutions or decisions should be expected from the summit. The goal was “to start identifying ... the underlying causes of the financial crisis,” she said.
 
According to John Podesta, co-chair of Obama’s transition team, Obama will not attend the summit in Washington, although some of the president-elect’s closest advisers may meet with some of the visiting leaders.
 
Several European leaders’ recent remarks on the financial crisis have been seen as an attack on capitalism.
 
Sarkozy has spoken of a “great opportunity” to abandon the “hateful practices” of the past.
 
“We cannot continue along the same lines because the same problems will trigger the same disasters … we must reform capitalism so that the most efficient system ever created doesn’t destroy its own foundations,” he said before meeting with Bush at Camp David last month.
 
Sarkozy also warned that it would be impossible to “continue to run the economy of the 21st century with instruments of the economy of the 20th century.”
 
European Parliament president, Hans-Gert Poettering, also weighed in.
 
“We are not in favor of a mere capitalistic system; we are in favor of social market policy,” he told the EurActiv news service last week.
 
Rejecting Sarkozy’s references to reforming capitalism, Poettering said, “Capitalism is without human background. I reject it, I have never accepted it.”
 
“I do not prefer ‘perestroika of capitalism,’ I rather prefer ‘social market policy.’”
 
Poettering is a German and a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party.
 
U.N. backs E.U.’s tough climate change targets
 
Barroso says the E.U. will play a central role in  creating new global rules to counter climate change.
 
He said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had written a letter requesting the E.U. to continue its leadership on climate change, an issue Ban has identified as the “defining challenge of our age.”
 
E.U. leaders have agreed to cut emissions of carbon dioxide – the “greenhouse gas” blamed for global warming – by at least 20 percent by 2020. But they have also pledged to increase that target to 30 percent if global targets can be agreed upon, hence their eagerness to get the U.S. onboard.
 
The E.U. has also set a binding 20 percent target for the use of renewable energy sources – up from around 8.5 percent now.
 
Barroso said Obama’s election was a chance to ensure that, if Europe and America were united, others would follow. He appealed to the president-elect to “join us for the creation of a more just, more democratic and freer world.”
 
Obama has said he wants to make the U.S. a leader on climate change and to re-engage with the U.N. initiative that gave rise to the Kyoto Protocol. He also plans to introduce emissions caps, with a goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 80 percent, by 2050.
 
President Bush rejected the Kyoto treaty, which required industrialized countries to reduce CO2 emissions by set targets, arguing that it would harm the U.S. economy and noting that major carbon emitters China and India were exempt. An international gathering late next year aims to reach agreement on a successor treaty.
 
Reinforcing the push towards climate change targets, Joseph Daul, the leader of the center-right EPP-ED Group – the largest political group in the European Parliament – said that despite the financial crisis, the E.U. must reaffirm its commitment to tackling global warming.
 
The E.U. and U.S. must “turbo-charge their political co-operation” to achieve their aims, he said.
 
See also:
E.U.’s Ambitious Green Goals Collide With Financial Crisis (Oct. 17, 2008)