Approving 2040 climate targets in the EU proving quite a challenge

In an article on the Business Green website, Andrew Warren, chair of the British Energy Efficiency Federation and a former special advisor to the UK House of Commons environment select committee writes about how hard-right members of the European Parliament have been given the rapporteur role that could prove hugely influential in shaping the EU’s 2040 climate target legislation

Hard-right MEPs risk doing serious damage to the EU’s climate policy agenda

The European Union civil service, the European Commission, has proposed a new 90% reduction target for greenhouse gas reductions between 1990 and 2040. According to Reuters, JULY 14,  it looks like the 27 national governments will agree to endorse that figure, albeit with some new loopholes.

So, the European Union is all set up to announce this impressive breakthrough agreement, achieving  widespread applause as world leaders, at the next relevant United Nations general assembly in September? And then at the climate change Conference of the Parties (COP30 ), due in Brazil in November?

Er, not quite. Because for the European Union to adopt formally any such position requires endorsement from the third leg of its administration. The European Parliament. Only when the Parliament and national ministers have agreed on their separate positions, can a three way “trialogue” negotiations between them and the Commission can begin finalising adoption of the 2040 legislative proposal.

Up until now, during such negotiations it has regularly been the MEPs who have promoted the more ambitious positions, frequently seeking more purposeful targets even than the European Commission. That has certainly been the position with most of the initiatives badged under the present  Commission’s flagship Green Deal programme – frequently with a member of the Parliament’s traditional conservative grouping, the EPP, taking the lead “rapporteur” role on the dossier.

The rapporteur is the MEP who will draft the initial position paper, negotiate with the other political groups to find an agreed  common position, set the timetable for its progress,  and then be the Parliament’s key negotiator during the ‘trialogue.”

But it will not be the EPP this time. This time round it will be the Parliament that acts as the unambitious drag upon progress. Unless there is radical change, it will be the Parliament that will cause the EU to go the UN, and then to COP30, with no new commitments. Only a business- as-usual package.

How has this happened? It is because of a backroom deal between easily the Parliament’s largest group, the EPP, and an ultra-right new grouping mysteriously called Patriots for Europe. To hand the latter the key rapporteur role. And then side with the so-called Patriots to block a subsequent move to fast track the dossier within the Parliament, thus excising the opportunity for the Patriots to cause much damage.

This fast-tracking concept has recently been permitted for files concerning the automotive industry, concerning deforestation, even wolf hunting. But apparently not for what the Social Democrat MEP Tiemo Wolken describes as  “the central crisis of our time.”

And even though the Danish government, now the current chair of the Council of the 27 governments, has promised an agreement on the 2040 climate goal “well ahead of COP30.”

Who are these Patriots for Europe? They consist primarily of large groups of MEPs from Spain (VOX), from Hungary (Fidesz), and from France (the RF, formally the National Front). All three consist largely of not so much climate sceptics, as climate deniers.

Its head is Jordan Bardella, who argues that the entire Green Deal concept needs a “complete reset, rather than cosmetic adjustments”, and has undertaken to use this opportunity to undo ‘the harmful influence of the ecologists and the left”. Incidentally, Bardella is also amongst the bookies’ favourites to succeed Emmanuel Macron as president of France.

What can Bardella and Co achieve with this dossier? In practical terms, they can use it to make a lot of climate change denying noise, noise which will undoubtedly be heavily publicised by the climate change denying media. Wait for even more anti-net zero features in the Daily Telegraph, the Sun, the Daily Mail, as well as their radical right counterparts throughout Europe.

By dragging their heels in arranging hearings and discussions within the Parliament; by postponing the production of any draft report;  by generally causing havoc within established procedure, these so-called Patriots are now in position to ensure that Europe’s 2040 policy remains in “draft” form well into 2026.

What they cannot do is deliver an actual majority in the European Parliament for any dossier that seeks to destroy the need to combat the growing threat of runaway climate change. The fiery Renew Europe (Liberal) MEP Pascal Canfin is hopefully too melodramatic when he warns that ”it is becoming toxic in the EPP to vote in favour of climate protection.”

What we may just have witnessed is simply another round of the interminable battle between two German EPP members. Between the recently re-elected Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who has made the Green Deal a signature part of her legacy. And her “frenemy”, the man she beat back in 2019 to be nominated as Council President, Manfred Weber, who is now the leader of the EPP in the European Parliament.

In the end, which may sadly now be some way off, the so-called Patriots are most unlikely to succeed in destroying the hard-won agreement between 27 national governments to reduce emissions by 90% by 2040, as the penultimate step towards the long-adopted net zero by 2050 goal.

Although I fear they might manage to expand the current opt out introduction,  currently permitting 3% of that 90% reduction target to be achieved by funding GHG saving schemes outside Europe. Given the appalling record of bogus external schemes, it is absolutely vital that compliance with the three established qualification criteria is strictly upheld.

These are that all external schemes funded must be:

a) aligned with the 2015 Paris Agreement

b) rooted in robust monitoring, verification of actual climate related outcomes, and factual reporting

c)  bringing tangible befits to host countries.

What is very clear is that there remain siren voices on the far right of politics, who have seized upon the disruption that combatting runaway climate change is bound to cause, to try to pretend it is all a hoax.

These are easy lines to peddle when in opposition. It is different when placed in power.