EU lawmakers call for faster climate change curbs

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Global temperature rises should be kept well below the European Union's target of 2 degrees Celsius to avoid costly damage to people and their lifestyles, the European parliament said on Wednesday.

Its members voted 566-61 in favor of a report which also said EU consumers must be given better information about the "carbon footprint" of goods they buy, including products imported into the 27-nation bloc.

The report is not part of a law but provides a stance for the parliament which has powers of co-decision on EU environment matters.

EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas criticized the United States for not helping control climate change and praised China for its efforts so far.

"We're calling on the United States of America to stop being an obstacle to progress in this area, and to actually be part of the process," he told parliamentarians.

"Discussions under way with the United States have started to move in the right direction... however we are still expecting them to improve their stance."

Washington argues that improved technology will do more to slow climate change than limits on industry.

The EU says any warming of the climate by more than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels would bring more damaging heat waves, storms, flooding and water shortages.

The bloc has adopted ambitious targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions by a fifth by 2020 from 1990 levels, and Dimas said it was making good progress with CO2 down 8 percent since 1990.

But the parliament's report seeks to go further.

"All efforts to curb emissions should in fact aim at staying well below the 2 degrees target, as such a level of warming would already heavily impact on our society and individual lifestyles," said the report, drawn up by German conservative member of parliament Karl-Heinz Florenz.

However, a U.N. panel of scientists says that target will be hard to achieve and that its best guess for temperature rises this century is between 1.8 and 4 degrees Celsius.

CLIMATE SCEPTIC

British conservative Roger Helmer argued that severe weather events had not become any more frequent. "Climate hysteria is increasingly remote from reality," he said. "We need to rethink our policies before they do any more damage."

Irish conservative Avril Doyle, who is guiding emissions trading legislation through the parliament, hit back:

"For legislators to ignore the peer-reviewed opinion of the overwhelming majority of scientists in the field of climate change throughout the world would be a combustible mixture of arrogance, irresponsibility and complete dereliction of duty."

The report called for the rapid development of eco-labeling to allow shoppers to trim their carbon footprints, and it touched on the divisive issue of so-called food miles.

Environmentalists recommend that people eat as much locally produced food as possible, ending carbon-intensive air-freighting of fruit and vegetables around the world.

But many developing countries, especially in Africa, say farmers are dependent on the lucrative trade which they contend is balanced out by less carbon-intensive farming methods.

(Writing by Pete Harrison, additional reporting by Paul Taylor, edited by Richard Meares)