There was good news and bad news from Europe this week on the environmental front.
The good news was extremely good. Despite having set an aggressive, and often contentious, goal of reducing all greenhouse gas emissions across the bloc 55% by 2030, the European Union is pretty much on target to achieve that, only missing the mark by one percentage point.
That figure is drawn collectively from member states’ national climate and energy plans, but assumes those intentions will be fulfilled to the letter. In its press release, the European Commission said: “In the current geopolitical context, this demonstrates that the EU is staying the course on its climate commitments, investing with determination in the clean energy transition, and prioritising the EU's industrial competitiveness and the social dimension.”
The bad news is that the good news comes at a time of increasing calls to soften environmental policies and aims, a sentiment echoed loudest by the decision to make more companies exempt from the region’s carbon border tariff. The justification behind now including just 10 per cent of the companies that would have been impacted is that they produce virtually all of the relevant emissions.
More broadly, EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra is considering options to soften the bloc’s 2040 climate goal, as he tries to contain a backlash against Europe’s climate ambitions.
As the Financial Times reported, while some smaller member states are pushing for reduced targets overall, some larger ones are asking for carbon credits to count, which would be something of a shifting of the goalposts. A tracker produced by the climate think-tank Ember has noted that the lion’s share of the 54% projection has come from changes in energy production, it said.
Which makes it all a bit challenging to work out what is really going on, and whether genuine progress is being made or this week’s news is a trumpeted trajectory amidst targets and commitments that remain in flux.
Meanwhile, Politico carried an interview with EU climate chief Teresa Ribera cautioning on excessive watering down of the goal, continuing to outline the case for a “pragmatic” 90% reduction in emissions by 2040 that the EU has pushed since the conclusion of European elections last year. Again, that mentioned the spectre of carbon credits being allowed towards national targets, in other words, taking action outside Europe to offset emissions within it, something that the EU has never sanctioned under its 2030 or 2050 goals.
In the UK, the 2050 net zero emissions target set back in 2019 has itself been a bone of political contention recently, given both former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s insistence that it is “doomed to fail” and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s that the 2050 goal is “impossible”.
Take a step back for a moment and take stock of all of that. They may be different jurisdictions now, but broadly speaking we have politicians across all of Europe sensing that they need to appeal to public sentiment that the emissions reduction transition is going too quickly and will have a disproportionate effect in their lives.
At the same time, we have a collective international update that the lofty ambition is very much on-target, and it’s the shift to the cleaner, cheaper energy in which much has been invested that’s the principal reason. Opposition to clean energy in itself seems unlikely to be much of a vote winner.
It all suggests that as the big goal continues to be pursued, and further policy and regulatory changes are made along the way, the devil will be even more in the detail than it already was and the science will have to hold firm.
For companies impacted by even relatively minor changes to how the transition is made — and there are many of them — clarity and consistency surely can’t come soon enough.
