Him Team Europe He’s not going through his best time. Team Europe, in English, is what is called the EU delegation that participates in climate summits, one of the most powerful, and in which the Commission and the Twenty-Seven usually act as a bloc. This gave them a lot of strength in negotiations at previous conferences, such as the one that ended on Saturday in the Brazilian city of Belém, COP30, without any mention of the need for countries to abandon fossil fuels.
But at the Belém event, this historic unity was complicated, since some countries, such as Italy and Poland, were reluctant to support this roadmap to abandon fossil fuels, the main battle experienced in this eventful United Nations conference which was paralyzed for hours by a fire.
In the final part of the summit, a group of 40 countries signed a letter pressuring the summit presidency to include these references to fuels. It was signed by 15 EU countries, including France, Germany and Spain, which was one of those promoting the initiative. But not the EU as a whole.
During the summit, European Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra spoke out in favor of adopting the roadmap with a direct reference to fuels, which the most fuel-dependent countries strongly opposed. And while this was being negotiated, the G20 summit in Johannesburg delivered a serious blow to the European negotiating position of the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. “We’re not fighting fossil fuels, we’re fighting fossil fuel emissions,” he said at a news conference. This is the argument that petrostates use at the top: we need to talk about emissions, not the fuels that cause them.
In recent years the European Union has raised the flag of green policies and the fight against climate change as one of its distinctive features. At climate summits he presented himself as a leader in the fight against warming. But the EU also went to Belém without having done all its homework.
The Paris Agreement, born from the COP of the French capital in 2015, and in which the EU played a decisive role in promoting this pact, establishes the objective that all signatory countries, almost 200, must periodically present plans to reduce their emissions. The EU always acts as a bloc and its plan is common for the Twenty-Seven. The second batch of these plans, known as NDC, was supposed to be ready in February 2025. But the EU missed that deadline and negotiations were delayed month after month due to the difficulty of agreeing targets within the Union.
Finally, the reform of the law establishing as mandatory a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 and an indicative range that can be presented to the United Nations as an NDC was approved almost instantly at the beginning of this month.
It would have been devastating if the EU had arrived at the summit without presenting that plan. But the delay is already a sign of what is happening with climate and environmental policies in the Union. For example, in the European Parliament, where the far right that emerged so strengthened by the 2024 European elections promised to end the Green Deal.
Climate ambitions are also weakening in more and more member states, including heavyweights such as Germany and France, which are forcing them to withdraw commitments already reached. For example, the iconic Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which was recently drastically downgraded, or the pioneering EU law against global deforestation (EUDR), which is also on track to be not only weakened, but even delayed again.
The warning signal, which had been flashing for some time, started again with the difficult negotiations for the approval of the 2040 targets and the NDC, which proved successful at the last minute, and only because so many flexibilities were accepted that some accuse the EU of cheating. “It’s like promising to run a marathon by training for just 10 kilometres, taking the bus to cover the last kilometre, and reserving the right to stay at home if it rains,” Greenpeace criticized the concessions.
Particularly noteworthy is the one that allows up to 5% of emissions to be reduced through so-called high-quality international credits, which amounts to outsourcing a task that should be carried out domestically.
But it was not the only setback for the climate ambitions of a Europe that has been slowly but surely dismantling its ambitious European Green Deal for months in the interest of the continent’s “competitiveness” against the United States and China. Europe is applying protectionist measures, such as tariffs or taxes on Chinese electric cars and aluminum. And the Chinese delegation present at COP30 repeatedly reproached Europe during the Belém summit.
Clean euphemisms
In Brussels we no longer talk about it greengreen, but cleanclean, in a euphemism that fails to mask the sharp turn the EU has taken in terms of climate ambition. Added to this is the growing power that ultra forces have in the European Parliament, where they have become the “alternative majority” that the European People’s Party (EPP) turns to when it fails to convince traditional pro-European parties to support its initiatives. Especially when it comes to lowering climate laws.
This has just happened again – and for the first time in a piece of legislation – with the alliance formed last week by European conservatives with ultra groups in the House to implement a drastic reduction in rules requiring corporate responsibility from large companies regarding human rights and the environment. After the vote, which took place in the middle of the climate summit in Belém, the far-right forces celebrated having “broken” the cordon sanitaire, as well as having opened a deep wound in the Green Pact.
And other curves arrive, both from the capitals and from the Chamber. This same week, the United States, led by a Germany that, in the face of economic uncertainty, has openly put aside the climate policy it once led, made a mess by betting on postponing the application of the regulation against deforestation for another year, until December 30, 2026. A regulation that aims to close the European market to products such as wood, coffee or cocoa that come from deforested lands or that contribute to the deforestation of the Amazon and other precious forests. The measure must now also be validated by the European Parliament, but there is no doubt that, in the current political landscape, it will go ahead.
“EU politicians flew to Belém to address the growing climate crisis, while internally discussing how to strip EU climate laws of their content,” the WWF denounced. “Member States’ claims that the fight against deforestation remains a priority are a clear distortion: they have just agreed to water down and delay the EUDR (the EU law against global deforestation), ignoring both the environmental objective of the regulation and the public money already invested in it,” complains Anke Schulmeister-Oldenhove, deforestation specialist at the NGO.
Nor was the vice-president of the European Commission for a clean transition, Teresa Ribera, able to hide her “deep disappointment and frustration” at the new step backwards by the states. “This is a bad decision that saddens me,” Ribera, who did not attend this year’s climate summit in Belém, said on social media. By the end of the year, the EPP also wants to lift the ban on the sale of combustion engine cars from 2035, another initiative that enjoys strong support from states such as Germany and Italy. And we’ve only been in office for a year.
