EU climate strategy risks Yellow Jackets-style backlash, ex-crisis chief warns

 

EU climate strategy risks Yellow Jackets-style backlash, ex-crisis chief warns

 

Make the green transition affordable instead of slowing it down, former Commissioner Janez Lenarčič tells Brussels.

“I think the gilets jaunes showed that you can’t punish people. You have to make the alternatives attractive,” Janez Lenarčič said.

 

December 16, 2024 6:00 am CET

By Zia Weise

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-climate-strategy-yellow-vest-backlash-risk-janez-lenarcic/

 

BRUSSELS — The European Union is imperiling its own climate efforts by whacking people with too many sticks and not offering enough carrots, the bloc’s former crisis management chief told POLITICO.

 

Janez Lenarčič spent much of the past five years helping countries in Europe and beyond mop up after various calamities. His term in the European Commission, which ended on Dec. 1, not only spanned the pandemic and the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also a dramatic surge in floods, fires and other disasters fueled by global warming.

 

Yet as climate catastrophes mount on European soil, demands for urgent action to tackle their cause — primarily the continued use of oil, gas and coal — haven’t grown louder. Instead, calls to slow the green transition now dominate the EU’s climate debate.

 

The EU’s approach to reducing planet-warming emissions is partly to blame, Lenarčič said in an interview just before leaving office.

 

Brussels has relied too heavily on imposing top-down regulations and raising the cost of fossil fuels rather than supporting industry and making climate-friendly alternatives affordable, he argued — risking a backlash akin to France’s gilets jaunes (Yellow Jackets) protests sparked by fuel tax rises.

 

“This is not a good way to do things in politics, to rely too much on the stick,” he warned. “I think the gilets jaunes showed that you can’t punish people. You have to make the alternatives attractive.”

 

Slowing down the green transition isn’t the answer, he insisted. “We are too slow. Not too fast. Too slow.”

 

Lenarčič was reluctant to knock his former Commission colleagues, but explicitly criticized the EU’s reliance on carbon pricing as its main lever for reducing emissions — a strategy that current climate chief Wopke Hoekstra strongly endorses.

 

To date, the EU’s only foray into mitigating the social consequences of this approach is an €86 billion fund to help poorer households cope with a new carbon price on car and heating fuels. Critics say the sum is vastly insufficient and warn of a voter backlash when the rules go live in 2027.

 

Lenarčič agrees. “Making the alternatives attractive by only making the old ways more expensive is not the way,” he said. “I’m afraid that this may backfire, honestly.”

 

The lack of incentives for Europeans to make green choices now jeopardizes the EU’s climate efforts and industrial competitiveness alike, he warned.

 

Take electric cars, which remain far pricier than fossil fuel-powered vehicles. EV demand has slowed in the EU, and in Germany, which ended its subsidy program last year, sales even declined.

 

“The fact that electric cars are much more expensive than conventional ones shows that we have not done the right thing,” Lenarčič said. “We have not invested in making green choices affordable and attractive. We could have done it and we didn't. … I think we’ve failed here.”

 

That has a cascading effect. The sales slowdown has left European manufacturers, already struggling to cope with competition from China, mired in crisis — prompting demands from industry bodies and conservative politicians to delay or water down the EU’s car emissions standards for next year.

 

“People don't want to buy electric vehicles and now Northvolt is in trouble” — the Swedish battery maker filed for bankruptcy shortly after the interview — “and car manufacturers are in trouble, our emission reduction goals are in trouble,” the former

 

Countercurrents

Demand for EU disaster aid exploded after Lenarčič, a Slovenian diplomat by training, joined the Commission in late 2019. Until then, requests for assistance from the EU’s crisis response mechanism, which coordinates the deployment of first responders and delivery of emergency equipment, numbered about 20 a year.

 

Between 2020 and 2024, annual requests rose to around 100, driven by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, but also by ferocious wildfires and devastating floods — including the 2023 disaster in Lenarčič’s native Slovenia, which wiped out 16 percent of the country’s GDP — becoming more and more frequent.

 

“The needs grew enormously” over the past five years, he said. “And a large part of that is undoubtedly due to the climate breakdown.”

 

As a result, awareness and demands for better disaster preparedness has grown across Europe. Lenarčič’s successor, Hadja Lahbib, even has “preparedness” in her official title. The new Commission is preparing a strategy to cope with the consequences of global warming, and Lenarčič himself laid the groundwork for the expansion of the EU’s firefighting fleet. (A model Canadair firefighting plane adorned his desk in the Commission’s Berlaymont HQ.)

 

The problem, Lenarčič warned, is that preparedness and post-disaster response measures have their limits. What’s really needed is an enormous step up in prevention efforts, he said — meaning faster cuts in planet-warming emissions, as every degree of warming leads to more frequent and intense weather extremes.

 

“And here I see the biggest shortcoming,” he said. Instead of greater urgency, the “countercurrents” against climate efforts are growing, which “show that apparently, lessons have still not been learned.”

 

That’s the case in Europe but also beyond, notably in the United States, where Donald Trump is about to return to the White House.

 

“There is a slowdown, and probably this will be reinforced with the recent election result in the U.S. Trump already said that he will withdraw again from the Paris Agreement. So we’re facing serious headwinds,” Lenarčič said.

 

He won’t be around to help the Commission deal with that. After taking a “long break,” he’ll look for “new challenges” outside the Brussels bubble, he said.

 

Help the farmers, help the climate

Throughout the interview, Lenarčič’s frustration with the direction of the debate in Europe was palpable.

 

“Instead of slowing down the green transition, we should accelerate it,” he said. “But I see the opposite happening, when I listen to the discussions in the European Parliament and elsewhere … I see quite a considerable backlash against the green agenda also at national level, which obviously is at odds with what is happening out there.”

 

In Parliament, conservative groups have sought to water down or reverse climate legislation from deforestation rules and pesticide regulations to emissions standards for cars. Several EU governments are calling for less stringent green laws.

 

Major business and farming associations have also lobbied against parts of the European Green Deal, with farmers taking to the streets across the continent earlier this year. The Commission’s response was to roll back certain requirements for farms — a mistake, Lenarčič believes.

 

“You have to understand that climate change is bad for business. Climate change is bad for farming. The loss of biodiversity is bad for both,” he said.

 

To him, the backlash is rooted in a lack of supportive measures.

 

“We have not done enough on concrete measures that would facilitate the transition that we have to undertake,” he said. “The farmers went out and sprayed horse manure around the European quarter in Brussels because we just imposed certain things that they have to do.”

 

There are signs that the EU executive is taking such advice into account. Yvon Slingerberg, a high-ranking official in the Commission’s climate department, acknowledged at a POLITICO event earlier this month that Brussels should have done more to ensure its green policies had voters’ support.

 

When asked about lessons learned from the last term in a recent interview with POLITICO, EU climate chief Hoekstra said the Commission would take a “broader and more holistic approach” to climate measures — including paying greater attention to social policies as well as preparedness against fires and floods.

 

Hoekstra also stressed that it was time for the EU to focus more on climate efforts abroad, given that the bloc accounts for only 6 percent of global emissions. China is responsible for more than a third and has just overtaken the EU in terms of historical emissions, leading some European politicians to suggest that the bloc is already doing more than enough.

 

But this kind of climate whataboutism isn’t helping anyone, according to Lenarčič.

 

“Everybody has to do this. Everybody has to make an effort. China is still building coal-fired power plants; they should stop, of course,” he said.

 

“But,” he quipped, “the Chinese are buying electric vehicles.”