Europe’s climate bubble bursts ahead of crucial summit
For six years, the European Union's efforts to combat climate change had been gaining momentum. However, on Wednesday morning, that progress came to a halt in a chaotic and exhausted scene.
After a marathon meeting that ran through Tuesday night and eventually ended a little after 9 a.m. the next morning, a majority of the bloc’s 27 governments agreed on new targets to cut pollution — but only by weakening existing laws and slowing domestic efforts designed to cut down on that very same pollution, News.Az reports citing Politico.
The compromise was met with relief by many countries and European Commission officials, who had feared an embarrassing collapse that would have hamstrung the EU on the eve of the COP30 U.N. climate talks in Brazil starting Thursday.
But it also underscored a swing in political momentum. After half a decade of green victories on climate policy, a much more skeptical group of countries and parties now has the upper hand.
In an interview just after the talks ended, the Commission's climate chief Wopke Hoekstra hailed the EU’s continuing “leadership role” on climate issues.
But the commissioner was candid about the political and economic realities — high energy costs, the rise of right-wing populists and declining industrial confidence — that had strengthened critics of the green agenda.
The EU was “staying the course” on fighting climate change, he told POLITICO, but added "it would be foolish to use the recipe of the past. We're facing massive change, so we need to adapt to that change."
Ministers also agreed on a target for 2035 — a requirement under the terms of the 2015 Paris Agreement that was due to be delivered earlier this year in advance of the COP30 talks. The ministers were unable to agree to a single number, instead promising a nonbinding cut between 66.25 and 72.5 percent.
The final deal on the binding 2040 goal came up short of the 90 percent cut in domestic pollution below 1990 levels, which Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had made the key green pledge in her reelection campaign.
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