Just when the French and Italians seemed to be uniting, things started to go wrong.
The car market in these countries is based around smaller cars that are better at meeting emissions targets. The car makers here were willing to accept tighter targets and the footprint, not weight-based parameter. In March 2008 it looked like France was willing to do the right thing by the environment.

“It is difficult to maintain that the heaviest and most powerful cars have an international right to emit more than others,” French Environment Minister, Jean-Louis Borloo said in a Ministerial debate.

But though Germany has a reputation for being one of the leading countries in Europe in the fight against climate change Angela Merkel's goverment soon stepped in and announced the setting up of a diplomatic working group to get a bilateral deal between France and Germany. No prizes for guessing who the winners and losers would be in that deal. That’s right, the German car makers win the right to carry on making big fast cars for as long as they can, meanwhile the climate loses.

The Merkozy (Merkel/Sarkozy) deal means that targets will be pushed back even further and car makers won’t have to achieve full compliance until 2015.

It weakens the existing targets even more, by insisting that 6-8 g of the target could be achieved using technologies that the EU has no testing procedures for. That means that cars could meet the emissions target with emissions level of 138g per km, which doesn’t sound like much of a reduction to me.

And if that wasn’t enough, the Merkozy deal is sufficiently vague about future targets that the 2020 target would be non-binding, and could be postponed or weakened.

France has the EU rotating presidency, so an agreement between the French and German politicians over car emissions which they’ve previously been at odds with couldn’t have come at a worse time.

And his keenness to accommodate the demands of German carmakers doesn’t give much hope for the rest of the EU’s legislation under the climate and energy package. The door would be left wide open to further undermining the EU’s climate ambition in order to cater for a string of special interests. We need to find a way to close that door now.