Fresh from the launch of a trillion-euro bid to slash dependency on Middle East oil and Russian gas, Europe sets out this week its most ambitious targets yet to offset climate change.

The EU, home to half a billion people and some 20 million companies, is committed to going “green” between now and 2050 as part of passionate moves to save the planet from global warming.

However, making the leap from promise to fulfillment looks sure to be a painful process requiring politically difficult choices by national leaders.

Today, the European Commission, the powerful EU executive, unveils its roadmap for driving action to mitigate climate change, demanding that the key farming, transport and construction sectors step up the plate.

Denmark’s Connie Hedegaard is the woman handed one of the most thankless tasks in Brussels politics – trying to pilot proposals through a crippling dependency on oil and gas imports, deep social instability in north Africa and potentially the Middle East as well as public suspicion of leaders’ number one ‘clean energy’ preference, nuclear power.

“It’s the start of ambitious forward planning – the stakes are enormous with huge choices to be made in terms of technologies,” admits an EU negotiator.

The commission’s proposals, to cover the decades between 2020 and 2050, should be taken hand in hand with last month’s decision by governments to announce a broad sweep of market reforms, linking national and regional electricity grids and gas pipelines by 2014.

The idea there was to allow power to circulate freely and cheaply, from those who produce it and have surpluses to those who do not but need it – with energy efficiency a core doctrine.

The other big change was to re-position domestically-produced nuclear energy at the heart of the bloc’s long-term supplies.

The attraction of low-emission nuclear generation was clear for leaders who also want to be seen to reduce carbon emissions despite deadlock at a global level on how, where and when to implement the cuts most scientists still say are required.

But radical additional measures are also needed if the EU is to deliver, ranging from new rules for transport to a tax on carbon emissions and inefficient ‘old’ energy consumption.

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