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The EU must double annual emissions cuts and move fast to pass existing green plans into law if it is to meet its climate targets, an independent adviser to the bloc has warned ahead of parliamentary elections in June.
A report by the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change on Thursday called on the bloc to implement previously announced plans to support clean technologies and the development of critical minerals as well as reforms to energy taxation.
“We cannot afford to lean back now,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, a leading German climate economist who chairs the board of scientists and economists. The EU “needs to provide long-term policy signals based on long-term plans for the net zero transition”, the report said.
Parliamentarians will meet for the last time in April ahead of elections in June, when rightwing parties that want to slow the pace of progress are expected to focus on rhetoric about the social costs of switching away from fossil fuels to combat climate change.
This is despite countries across Europe suffering from fires, droughts and floods of greater ferocity due to climate change. The continent has warmed twice as fast as the global average for the past 30 years.
The advisory board called for crucial elements of the EU’s broad package of climate and industrial policy to be passed into law as soon as possible.
This includes the Critical Raw Materials Act and the Net-Zero Industry Act, both partly as a response to clean technology subsidies in the US, as well as a proposal to amend the decades-old Energy Taxation Directive so as to remove tax exemptions for aviation and shipping.
“The message is clear: this is a race against the clock and the EU and its member states cannot be short-sighted,” said Elisa Giannelli, who leads on EU politics and governance for the climate-focused think-tank E3G.
On the international stage, moving too slowly “risks jeopardising the EU’s climate leadership and credibility”, and causing it to “lag behind” on competition from the energy and industrial green transition outside of the continent, Giannelli added.
The report called for an “urgent” end to subsidies for the most polluting energy sources both by the bloc and its 27 member states — highlighting gaps between the EU’s own policies and its diplomatic push to phase out fossil fuels at the recent UN COP28 climate summit in Dubai.
Annual investments in the electricity grid must increase by half to reach nearly €60bn a year, alongside “massively” scaling up investment in solar and wind energy deployment, it added.
Mainstream parties are increasingly weaponising climate change and immigration ahead of the parliamentary elections, a policy brief by the European Council on Foreign Relations outlined on Wednesday.
The centre-right European People’s party, expected to hold on to its position as the largest bloc in parliament, backs strong decarbonisation targets for the EU. But it has also argued that green regulation must not come at the cost of national interests and economic prosperity.
“Climate is being ‘renationalised’, as a green backlash becomes a powerful rallying cry for the anti-establishment right,” wrote the ECFR report authors, Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard.
Top politicians in the EPP, which has positioned itself as the party of farmers, have opposed measures to limit the use of pesticides and protect biodiversity.
The EU’s progress in cutting greenhouse gases linked to agriculture has lagged behind its achievements in other sectors such as energy, industry and buildings in recent decades, in part because of the Common Agricultural Policy’s support for emissions-intensive livestock production, according to the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change.
The board recommended reforms to the EU’s agricultural subsidy programme and said the EU should consider bringing farmers into its flagship emissions trading scheme.
To stay on track with its objectives to cut emissions by 55 per cent by the end of the decade and to hit net zero by 2050, the EU’s collective annual emission cuts must more than double — from an average of 62mn tonnes of CO₂ equivalent between 2005 and 2022 to 141 Mt CO2e per year for 2022 to 2030, the report said.
Decarbonising by 90 per cent to 95 per cent by 2040 would require even higher annual cuts of 198 Mt CO2e in the 2030s, the report also calculated.
Member states are due to submit revised national climate action plans to the EU by June, and the EU’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra has committed Brussels to introducing a further bloc-wide target to cut emissions by “at least” 90 per cent by 2040.
Hoekstra said the bloc was “by and large on the right track” to meet its climate commitments. Member states were working to implement new climate laws, he added, and the commission, the EU’s executive branch, was “laying the groundwork for Europe’s climate ambition in 2040,” he said.
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