Extreme weather is occurring more and more often.
These examples all took place within two weeks
and show how climate change is increasing the intensity and frequency of these events.
Scientists have been begging for urgent action, and Europe is stepping up the plate.
The European Commission put forward the world’s first
wide-ranging and concrete set of measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
So, what’s the plan?
The European Union has pledged to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by at least
55% from 1990 levels within the next ten years.
That’s very ambitious because it has only cut its emission by 24% so far since 1990 and it is
putting in place a lot of policies designed to get it to that more ambitious target in 2030.
The aim is to become carbon neutral by 2050,
and now it’s published the proposals it hopes will help the 27-member bloc reach that goal.
For example, the new measures would mandate:
a de facto ban on producing new diesel- and gasoline-powered cars by 2035,
producing at least 40% of energy from renewable sources,
and planting three billion trees across Europe by 2030.
The centerpiece of this package is a plan to make polluters
pay for their emissions. So how would this work?
Europe’s Emissions Trading System, which has been in place since 2005,
puts a limit on the total amount of greenhouse gases that businesses across the EU can emit.
Under the scheme, a set number of emissions allowances are issued every year.
Companies must hold enough of these allowances to cover their emissions, or they’ll get a big fine.
These allowances act as a type of currency.
If a company doesn’t have enough allowances, they must either cut
their emissions or buy allowances off another business who didn't use theirs up.
This serves as a financial incentive,
rewarding companies which cut their carbon dependency and upping costs for big polluters.
The overall limit is gradually reduced over time
to keep the continent on course for its long-term climate targets.
And the European Commission wants to take it a step further.
The aviation industry, for instance, had been exempt from these requirements since 2012.
The commission wants to phase that out.
It also wants shipping, one of the most polluting sectors,
to be included in its emissions trading scheme too.
It has also suggested a second Emissions Trading System, which would include road
transportation and emissions from buildings.
We have seen dramatic falls in greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector,
but the two laggards at the moment is transports, it’s the way we get around and then the other is
on the buildings sector, where at the moment too many houses in Europe are heated by gas,
fossil gas, we need to get rid of that, we need to get out of this system entirely and they're the
trickiest nuts to crack because they have a direct impacts on the lives of citizens,
so it's really important that we address those emissions in a way which is socially fair.
The commission is aware that the transition to carbon neutrality will have a cost,
and that it’s likely to hit the most vulnerable parts of society the hardest.
That’s why it has suggested that 25%
of the revenue from emissions trading should go to a Social Climate Fund.
The fund will be dedicated to helping these citizens pay for energy efficient technologies,
including heating and cooling systems and cleaner transport.
But the EU can’t control what happens outside of its borders,
which is why the commission also wants to impose a carbon price on imports.
The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, also known as CBAM, puts a price on carbon imports.
It’s designed to incentivize places with less stringent
emission rules to reduce their carbon footprint.
If approved, it would make importing these goods just as expensive as producing them
on the continent under the EU’s carbon pricing rules.
But countries such as China, India, South Africa and Brazil have raised concerns about what
this could mean for their economies and people.
CBAM has very big implications for countries which are exporting into
the EU market and they are going to have to
invest in serious dialogue with those countries to bring them on board.
And one of the ways to do that is to make sure that the revenues that will be generated
are returned to those countries to support their low carbon transition.
As you can see, this plan is quite detailed.
And though it takes concrete steps towards a carbon neutral continent,
some environmental groups say Europe should be even more ambitious.
We find that this package is not credible, that this package is much too low
and that this package gives the impression that the EU is acting when actually the
action is too weak, too slow to prevent the dramatic impacts of runaway climate change.
For Greenpeace this package is based on a target that is too low, is not aligned with science
and it will not prevent the ongoing destruction of the earth’s life’s support systems.
If they had proposed this climate package 30 years ago, I think they would have received
a lot of praise but now we no longer have the time for the small evolutionary steps.
Others are concerned about implementation.
It's fine to set the policy, but we have seen many cases where policies
haven’t really been realized.
We look for instance to what happened in France when it
tried to increase carbon taxes on fuels. It led to a backlash.
These proposals are now in the hands of European lawmakers, who will have to
decide whether they go too far or lack the ambition needed to tackle climate change.
Which leaves one more critical question: when will they come into force?
It is not going to be an easy path. We can expect at least two years of legislative process.
We have up to 12 pieces of legislation with really
significant implications for the European economy, all moving together.
So, on the one hand this means there is a huge complexity, there is a huge workload, a huge
burden but at the same time there are advantages in trying to do everything
together in a big package, because it means that you can have trade-offs.
One of the reasons that we can have some hope here is that businesses, companies won’t need to wait
for all of this legislation to be made law before they start changing the way they do business.
The signal has now been sent; the winners in the new economy will be the ones that
move fastest towards zero carbon business models.
We are already too late in moving on climate change, we can see
this summer, extreme weather events all around the world, and it is going to continue to get worse
for at least the next three decades until we get to net zero as a world.
We need to make this transition orderly because if we kill lots of people and lose
lots of jobs in the process of getting to net zero then that will not be a successful route.
We need an orderly but accelerated transition towards net zero emissions.