The European Commission today publishes a proposed directive to promote renewable energy, with the aim of reaching the objective of 20% of energy consumption by 2020. The Commission deserves praise for helping with the circulation of green energy certificates among member states, which should assist some to fulfil their objectives. Notre Europe has already recommended the unification of the market for these certificates, if necessary by means of an enhanced cooperation measure between countries concerned: see Collective Power: Enhanced Cooperation as the Driver of a Common Tradable Green Certificate Market.

In its proposal, the Commission also deals with the implementation of the 10% goal for biofuels in transport by 2020. Pierre Rainelli's study, The Future of Biofuels and their Impact on Agricultural Markets, and Josef Schmidhuber's policy paper, Biofuels: An Emerging Threat to Europe's Food Security? Impact of an Increased biomass use on agricultural markets, prices and food security: A longer-term perspective both back the cautious approach advocated by the Joint Research Centre.

The Commission's proposals for the EU emission trading scheme (ETS) are informed by experience of the first phase of the project. Notre Europe welcomes the extension of the scheme to the six greenhouse gases covered by the Kyoto protocol, and to all machinery for which emissions can be measured and checked as reliably as CO2 is today. Notre Europe also supports the proposal to abolish national quota allocations in favour of a Europe-wide emissions ceiling, and the progressive (if perhaps excessively progressive) auctioning of quotas. Several more proposals in this vein are laid out in the 2006 study Sense and Flexibility: the Implementation of the EU ETS, in which Notre Europe reviewed application of the EU ETS.