Von der Leyen's bonfire of the climate laws
Today the EU backs away from its Green Deal, as concerns over near-term security threats overshadow the long-term threat of climate change. But some argue today's reframing will help climate efforts.
The European Commission is expected to today adopt its controversial Omnibus proposal and Clean Industrial Deal strategy, both of which will dilute climate legislation adopted during the first term of President Ursula von der Leyen as part of her EU Green Deal. In ordinary times, this would be a big news event. But you’re unlikely to hear about it today from the main national news media because it feels so overshadowed by the larger threat to Europe’s very existence posed by this month’s collapse of the transatlantic alliance. Environmentalist protesters gathered yesterday in the EU Quarter to protest the great leap backward on climate (pictured above), but it got little attention.
The lack of attention is the very reason why these actions are being taken now. Today’s move is a response to the reality that climate change has fallen down the list of European citizens’ concerns, and they voiced that with their vote in the June EU election. The majority of Europeans voted for centre-right or far-right parties that campaigned against the Green Deal and said they would scrap climate laws, and this proportion was even higher among Gen Z voters who made a big shift toward the far right. The Greens lost a third of their seats in the European Parliament. For reasons I explored in this post in August, climate went from being a main issue on voters minds in the last EU election in 2019 to off the radar in 2024. Surveys have shown that the vast majority of Europeans & Americans don't know about the Green Deal & IRA respectively - including a lot of the very people who marched on the streets in 2019 demanding climate action. The anti-politics ethos of the Fridays for Future movement meant that they didn’t engage or even pay much attention to what was being passed legislatively, meaning that there was nobody to defend the Green Deal and IRA from the right-wing caricatures that have been cemented in much of the publics’ minds. They squandered the political wind that they had at their backs six years ago.
Elections have consequences, and today is a consequence. President von der Leyen is rebranding the Green Deal as the Clean Industrial Deal because the Green Deal became so toxic as a phrase during the EU election campaigns. And the push-back has been minimal, reaffirming that this is the smartest thing for her to do politically.
By throwing these regulations into the bonfire today, President von der Leyen is likely hoping to placate not only the voices within her own center-right European Peoples Party (such as its leader Manfred Weber) who criticised her Green Deal during last year’s election campaign. She is also looking to woo voters away from the far right and back to the centre right by addressing the perception that the EU has been overzealous with climate legislation. It is an attempt to answer the criticism from people like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen, whose far-right ECR and PfE groups are now the fourth and third-largest in the European Parliament respectively.
Climate campaigners were at least hoping for some good news today after reports claimed that the Commission would finally be putting forward an emissions reduction target for 2040 alongside these rowback measures. The Commission recommended a year ago that a 90% emissions reduction target for 2040 be set (to come in between the existing 55% 2030 and net zero 2050 targets), but didn’t come forward with an actual proposal because it was considered too late in the term. Last night we learned that the 2040 target has been pulled from today’s college agenda, which is not a good sign for its survival. There has been some scepticism that the EU executive would ever actually propose it because the EPP doesn’t like the idea. Further targets are very unpopular in Poland, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council, so at the moment their is Council resistance.
The European Union has the world’s most stringent and ambitious climate policy in place, and even with this walk-back it will still be miles ahead of the United States. But as Trump shreds what little American climate regulation exists and takes the US out of the Paris Agreement, other countries around the world are seeing it as an excuse to roll back their own efforts. The EU is no exception, as businesses worry that they will be uncompetitive if they are restrained by climate legislation while their American competitors aren’t. Even the measure that was supposed to shield them from that unfair competition from climate laggards, the carbon border levy (CBAM, more on that below), now looks in danger.
So, what’s in the firing line? As I’ll outline below, the Omnibus proposal will weaken the Corporate Sustainability Reporting and Due Diligence directives, the EU Taxonomy Regulation and apparently also the planned carbon border levy. The Clean Industrial Deal will introduce a more general principle that if green laws are hurting the economy in any way, they’ve got to go (it’s being promoted as an effort to reduce red tape for businesses). “The Commission has decided to tear down three key pillars of the Green Deal that ensure businesses act responsibly throughout their value chain – a reckless move that could actually not only hinder the EU's environmental goals but also the competitiveness of the EU market,” says Amandine Van den Berghe, a lawyer at the advocacy group ClientEarth.