Dumping the Green Deal

Dumping the Green Deal

By Mehreen Khan

April 3, 2020

Green advocates: look away now. The history of recent crises suggests that ambitious environmental goals are usually the victim of economic downturns. Will the coronavirus pandemic prove any different?

It’s a question beginning to exercise minds in Brussels which only a month ago was dominated by the European Commission’s landmark attempt to make Europe the world’s first climate neutral continent by 2050. Fast forward to today and the phrases “Green Deal” and “climate neutrality” have been largely wiped from the Brussels discourse and replaced by urgent calls for European solidarity in the face of what is expected to be a seismic global downturn.

But the EU’s Green Deal is still here even if Europe’s political energies are being directed toward the pandemic. Before the onset of the virus, one of the key planks of the commission’s green strategy was a ramped-up target for 2030 emissions cuts. Brussels had been due to present the final figure — between 50-55 per cent, an increase compared with the current 40 per cent — after the summer. Green advocates were pushing for member states and MEPs to ratify the target just in time for the global COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in November.

The COP has now been postponed and the EU robbed of a milestone that was being used to strong-arm some of its climate laggards to get their act together this year. Frans Timmermans, commissioner in charge of the Green Deal, said that Brussels “will not slow down our work domestically or internationally to prepare for an ambitious COP26 when it takes place”.

Pro-environment governments and MEPs will still want the 2030 target approved as fast as possible. But the massive corona-induced economic slowdown poses a serious headache for commission officials whose job it is to forecast what impact higher short-term emissions cuts will have on an economy now in line to suffer a fall in output worse than the Great Depression. “The commission is trying to hit a moving target,” says an EU diplomat. “What GDP baseline do you use for the impact assessment? If it doesn’t take into account the lockdown then the member states will quickly deem it useless.”

Reluctant member states, which were already resisting what they saw as expensive decarbonisation policies, sense an opportunity to put the brakes on. Czech prime minister Andrej Babis was among the first to call for a junking of the green agenda in the face of the pandemic. Lobbying from sectors such as airlines may also lead Brussels to postpone promised reforms to its carbon trading system and delay a 2021 review of car emissions targets in a bid to alleviate the regulatory pressure on besieged European business.

But the global disruption might not be all bad. Some see the virus as an opportunity for an environmental revolution. For a start, Europe’s lockdown has already led to drastic drops in greenhouse gas emissions as we all travel and consume less. Jos Delbeke, a former senior EU climate official now at the European University Institute in Florence, thinks the shutdown could “induce a change in our habits” where demand for air travel is permanently reduced even after the economy is back up and running.

The drastic fall in the cost of oil also need not be a reason to stifle the transition to renewable energy. Jacob Funk Kirkegaard at the Peterson Institute urges the EU to seize the opportunity to raise fuel levies to maintain government revenues and stay firmly on the path of decarbonisation. “The EU cannot afford to lose three to five years of new green investments, potentially stifling investment in renewable energy, because of lower oil prices,” he writes.

mehreen.khan@ft.com; @mehreenkhn