BRUSSELS, Jan 10: The European Commission unveiled a vast plan on Wednesday to diversify energy sources, slash carbon emissions and boost competition in the face of tension over Russian oil and gas supplies and global warming fears.

Calling for a `post-industrial revolution’, the European Union’s executive arm said the 27-nation bloc `needs new policies to face new realities’. Some provisions of the proposal drew immediate objections from France and Germany, however.

“Europe must lead the world into a new, or maybe one should say, post-industrial revolution -- the development of a low carbon economy,” commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso told journalists.

“We have already left behind our coal-based industrial past, it is time to embrace our low carbon future,” he added.

The main planks of the package, which the commission hopes EU leaders will endorse at a summit in March, include plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2020 and to spur competition by demanding that big energy companies separate production and distribution operations.

Environmentalists charged that the emissions target was not ambitious enough however, while some EU governments, notably France, balked at the prospect of energy companies having to break up their operations to boost competition.

Energy issues have climbed to the top of the EU's political agenda over the last year owing to surging oil prices and concerns about the reliability of Russian oil and gas supplies.

Fresh anxiety about Russian energy was sparked this week after the flow of Russian oil to five EU states -- including Germany -- was disrupted due to a transit dispute between Moscow and Belarus. But Belarus said yesterday it had lifted a demand that Russia pay transit fees on oil exports passing through Belarussian territory, clearing the way for a resolution of the dispute.

Barroso nonetheless maintained that the flap had damaged the credibility of both sides and said it was “unacceptable” that EU supplies could be cut without consultation.—AFP