That drew a tart response from Friends of the Earth, which accused the commission of putting the immediate interests of industry ahead of Europe’s broader welfare.

“Barroso and his commissioners seem to have fallen for the old-think industry spin that there must be a trade-off between climate action and economic recovery,” Brook Riley, the group’s climate and energy campaigner, said in a statement. “This position completely ignores the huge financial cost of dealing with the impacts of climate change and the 500 billion euros the E.U. is spending every year on oil and gas imports.”

The British government, a frequent critic of what it sees as moves by the European Union that inhibit economic performance, welcomed the proposals. It singled out for praise the scrapping of national targets for renewable energy in favor of an overall goal of producing 27 percent of Europe’s energy from renewables by 2030, an approach that will leave countries battling among themselves over who should do more.

“If you set rigid, inflexible targets, that is likely to result in greater costs,” said Edward Davey, Britain’s secretary of state for energy and climate change. “We believe our existing approach will enable us to meet these objectives without having to take more action, but we believe other countries will have to take more action.”

Before Wednesday’s announcement, business groups lobbied hard against more stringent targets that they worried could endanger Europe’s still very feeble economic recovery and slow the job creation needed to bring down an overall unemployment rate of nearly 11 percent.

In a letter sent to the European Commission this month, 14 executives at large companies called for “one single, realistic target” and warned that “the high-cost of noncompetitive technologies to decarbonise the power sector” will strain businesses already hit by Europe’s high energy prices, particularly for electricity, which costs twice what it does in the United States.

Ms. Hedegaard on Wednesday acknowledged that Europe needed to bring down its energy prices but said that the shift to renewable sources played a “negligible” part in the problem. But she also took a swipe at what she suggested were unrealistic demands by environmental activists, noting that “we are trying to do something that is achievable, that is doable and practical for 28 governments to back.”