In December 2019, Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Commission, presented with great fanfare the so-called "Green Deal." The package consisted of new laws and directives, goals and multi-billion-euro funding opportunities designed to transform the continent into a sustainability powerhouse and a model for the rest of the world. The initiative aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2030, compared to 1990 levels, and to net zero by 2050. Additional goals were added, such as making farming more sustainable, rewilding large swaths of Europe’s natural areas and halving pesticide use in agriculture, among others.
But four years later, progress on green policies in Europe is stalling or, worse, going backward. Instead of moving ahead with bold actions to fight climate change and biodiversity loss, many efforts are under attack, have been watered down, or are even being reversed in individual member states and at the EU level. Rattled by Russia’s war against Ukraine and global instability, EU countries are scrambling to secure alternative sources for fossil fuels instead of accelerating renewable energy use, and they are wary of imposing new emissions-reduction rules on the auto industry. Faced with a string of electoral victories of right-wing populist parties in Italy, Finland, Sweden and Hungary — often with strong support from farming communities — issues such as protecting biodiversity have moved from a hard-won central position to the fringe. Europe’s role as a green frontrunner has been fundamentally called into question as it faces strong political forces in many capitals.
In Germany, conservative state governors, who once hugged trees in election campaigns, are ridiculing environmental policies.
Germany, the EU’s most populous state and its largest economy, exemplifies the recent shift. When Steffi Lemke, the German cabinet minister in charge of the environment, spoke at the country’s most prestigious environmental awards ceremony in late October, she laid out the issue bluntly. "As ecologists and environmentalists, we underestimated how great the resistance would be when we started to bring the goals of the Paris climate agreement and the Montreal biodiversity agreement to life," the Green Party member said. "But now we face the wall of those who want to prevent this and who don’t want to move forward."
Only a few days later, Christian Lindner, leader of the neoliberal Free Democratic Party, which shares power with the left-leaning Greens and the center-left Social Democratic Party in Germany’s coalition government, proved Lemke’s point. Citing energy insecurity due to the Ukraine war, Lindner, who is also Germany’s finance minister, withdrew his party’s support for a crucial agreement between the governing parties to phase out the nation’s coal-burning power plants by 2030. "Until it is clear that energy is available and affordable, we should end dreams of phasing out coal-fired power" by that year, he said. The goal of the phaseout was to create additional pressure for utilities to expand wind and solar farms as fast a possible. Without the 2030 deadline, that pressure is much reduced.
Earlier in the year, the Free Democrats weakened the Greens’ most important piece of legislation, which aimed to replace heating systems that run on oil and gas with heat pumps and renewable energy sources. In addition, the Free Democrats, responsible for the government’s transport policy, have blocked all attempts to reduce car traffic or impose a national speed limit on autobahns. The country’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, from the Social Democratic Party, has largely given the Free Democrats a free hand in their anti-environment course.
Scholz fears that ever-stricter rules on heating and car use will further increase support for hard-right parties, who promise to abandon environment targets altogether. Populist sentiments have run high in Germany since the summer, when the influential Bild tabloid — co-owned by KKR, one of the largest investment firms serving the U.S. fossil fuel industry — launched a months-long campaign against an alleged "Heiz-Hammer," or heating hammer, that was seen as forcing sudden changes upon ordinary people. Neoliberals and conservatives "have made the Greens public enemy No. 1," Sudha David-Wilp, director of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund, a research institute, told The New York Times. Conservative state governors, who only a few years ago hugged trees in election campaigns and promised to save dwindling insect populations, are ridiculing or fiercely attacking environment policies, warning of a looming "Verbotstaat," a term for government overreach.
We urgently need a signal to Europe that Germany will take further steps.
Brigitte Knopf, deputy chair of the scientific body in charge of monitoring Germany’s progress toward its climate goals, is deeply concerned. The nation has committed to shrinking its CO2 emissions to 65 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Yet the decrease is not fully supported by concrete measures. In order to comply with its year-to-year goals, Germany would need to prevent cumulative emissions of about 1 billion tons of CO2 until 2030. But "even after the government passed its most important CO2 reduction package this summer, there is [an emissions] gap of 200 million tons" — a 20 percent shortfall — mainly in the areas of heating and transport, she warned.
Knopf, a physicist who also serves as secretary general of the Berlin-based think tank Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, is worried that the German government will set a bad example in the EU and neglect its obligations under the Paris climate accord. "We urgently need a signal to Europe that Germany will take further steps," she said. "But right now, the climate gap is simply accepted."
Since the EU’s Green Deal was launched in 2019, some progress has been made across the 27 nations. Greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by 31 percent compared to 1990, according to new data from the European Environment Agency. The EU has created a powerful emissions trading system that puts a price on CO2 and reduces available allowances year by year. By 2028, this system is planned to include 75 percent of all energy-related emissions.
But there’s still a long way to go. CO2 emissions have to decrease sharply, mainly in areas such as heavy manufacturing and steelmaking, which are difficult to decarbonize, and emissions from vehicles with combustion engines, which means cutting into people’s routines. At 23 percent, the share of renewable energy is far below the 2030 target of 42.5 percent.
Meanwhile, biodiversity in Europe continues to dwindle. Populations of formerly common birds inhabiting farmland have shrunk by more than one-third since 1990. Protected areas of land and sea cover far less than the 30 percent target, and a new study has just revealed that nearly one-fifth of all European plant and animal species are threatened by regional extinction, a much higher share than recent Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services assumptions. Last week, a tentative agreement was reached in Brussels on what’s been called the "world’s first nature restoration law," which aims to put in place measures to restore 20 percent of the EU’s terrestrial and marine ecosystems to good condition by 2030, and to restore all degraded ecosystems by 2050. But it came with so many caveats and concessions that environmental organizations were not in a mood
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