Letter: European Commission lacks leadership on climate

From Theresa Scavenius, Associate Professor, University of Aalborg, Copenhagen, Denmark

On Monday, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission noted on Twitter that “once again the climate alarm sounds”. The alarm she was referring to is the latest IPCC report, and she concluded that the EU is “doing its part”.

But is that true? The reality is that the European Commission has shown itself to be an incapable and incompetent leader in the global climate political transition from a black to a green economy, if we set all the fancy papers and words aside and only look at the numbers.

The fact of the matter is that the EU and the rest of the world do not make policies that comply with the Paris Agreement, which sets 1.5C as the target. This means that we must now consider a world that is over 3-4C warmer as the most probable scenario, not a robust and effective institutional response to climate change.

So here is a piece of advice for von der Leyen. First of all, the commission should start with the fact that Europe has already exhausted the CO2 budget for 1.5C. This means that we are in debt to the rest of the world and to future generations.

If the EU should abide by the Paris Agreement, it would require a harsh cure in order to protect the resource base of our economy.

The climate cure should include three climate measures: 1) stop all expansion of the fossil fuel sector and economy. This would be a paradigm shift in which policy is not subject to demands for growth, competitiveness, and exports; 2) introduce a strict climate regulation that quickly phases out all black products and services, and at the same time initiates a massive market-driven phasing in of green products and services; and 3) pay for other countries’ green transitions.

These policies would be to take our part. However, effective climate leadership by the commission is unlikely to happen when we take the commission’s climate policies of the past into account. Tweets are not a substitute for real global leadership.