On her first day in office, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stood in front of world leaders at a UN climate conference in Madrid and promised to make Europe the world’s first carbon neutral continent within the next 30 years.
“The European Green Deal is Europe’s new growth strategy,” she said.
That made Paul Polman smile. A former CEO of Unilever, 63-year-old Polman is part of a network of climate activists who in 2017 began lobbying the highest levels of EU leadership to make climate change a major policy focus.
Illustration: Lance Liu
“Momentum is building faster than we thought,” he said in an interview a few weeks after the conference. “We can still make these transformations work if we want to.”
In her speech, Von der Leyen said that the plan would not only position Europe at the forefront of the fight to limit global warming, it would also drive a new wave of economic development and help bind the continent together.
She has since described the proposal as a moonshot, but it is considerably more than that. The EU would need to mobilize as much as 260 billion euros (US$286 billion) annually over the next decade to build green infrastructure. That is not an Apollo space program — that is one Apollo program per year, and it is just part of what the Green Deal will entail.
Three years ago, this would have all seemed far-fetched at best. Progressive politics was in a worldwide slump. US President Donald Trump was taking office. Britain had just voted to quit the EU and German Chancellor Angela Merkel was limping into a re-election campaign, wounded by her decision to help refugees flooding into Europe from the wars in the Middle East. Climate policy risked being swept up in the backlash against immigrants and bureaucrats.
“I was afraid that people would think we wanted to attack their way of life, take their cars, impose eco-taxes and limit their access to consumer products,” said Laurence Tubiana, another member of the activist network who also helped broker the Paris Agreement in 2015.
This was not their first attempt at influencing European policy. The group coalesced over three decades, made up of those who were frustrated at world leaders’ lack of progress against climate change.
Some — like Tubiana, who now runs the European Climate Foundation, and Teresa Ribera, who last month became deputy prime minister of Spain — are public figures. Others, like Polman, had distinguished careers in the private sector. They even had high-level allies in countries that oppose efforts to fight climate change and were already at work connecting scientists and policy experts with heads of state, central bankers, and even religious and military leaders.
However, this time they had momentum behind them. The Davos, Switzerland, crowd had started to draw attention to the looming climate catastrophe and powerful individuals, such as BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Pope Francis, had started to speak out.
With EU parliamentary elections coming up last year, there was no time to waste. A quirk in the European political calendar meant that a new parliament, a new European Commission and a new European Central Bank chief would be taking over almost at the same time — a total political reset.
So in 2017 the network started to move. With Tubiana at its helm and Polman on its board, the European Climate Foundation ran private polls to reinforce the idea that environmental issues figure near the top of younger voters’ concerns. The activists then took those numbers to members of the European Parliament. Climate policy could address not just global warming, but also a whole raft of challenges that establishment parties had been wrestling with, from unemployment to disenchantment with the European project.
“We needed to find a project that united European citizens around something that wasn’t a bureaucratic construction, a true common political project,” Tubiana said. “That was climate.”
There was a political logic to putting climate at the heart of political parties’ campaigns for the elections in May last year. Polls in the run-up to the vote showed that populists were set for significant gains and the next commission president might need the backing of most mainstream parties to win a confidence vote and take office.
Together with the think tanks Agora Energiewende in Germany and Forum Energii in Poland, the informal network kept the pressure on policymakers. They met with all EU parties about the need to toughen existing climate goals and win their support for a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, which had already been proposed by the European Commission in 2018.
Of course, the Greens were on board. The Socialists already had a robust climate agenda and the Liberals were heading in that direction. The last hurdle was the European People’s Party, the conservatives who constitute parliament’s largest bloc. Their 2014 manifesto had included only a brief mention of environmental issues, but for last year’s election, climate change was among its list of the top threats.
“The different families had worked for a year on making this the focus of their identity in contrast to the extremists,” Ribera said.
Without that focus, Von der Leyen “might not have got past the confidence vote,” she added.
By the time last year’s campaign began, thousands of teenagers led by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg were calling for climate action in marches in Europe’s main cities. EU policymakers realized that existing policies to reduce emissions were not enough to keep the region in sync with the objectives of the Paris Agreement. They saw investment flowing between the US and China with Europe cut out.
Even with overwhelming support from European citizens, the Green Deal is facing an uncertain future. Attracting the scale of investment needed to overhaul everything from agriculture to transportation will pose the biggest challenge, as Europe’s economic growth lags far behind major world economies such as China and India.
“We have the science, we have the technology, we can certainly find the money,” EU Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans, the bloc’s climate czar, said at a conference last month. “It sounds daunting, but I was in Davos last week and I hear what people are talking about, the size of investments they are thinking about.”
That same month, the European Commission unveiled a 1 trillion euro plan designed to be the investment pillar of the Green Deal. It envisions earmarking about 500 billion euros from the EU budget for the clean shift over the next decade, while separately leveraging 280 billion euros of private and public investment and establishing a funding mechanism with another 143 billion euros, also from public and private sources, to help regions facing the most costly cleanups.
That might help placate poorer member states concerned about the dizzying costs of the Green Deal, but it will not prevent the inevitable wrangling about how to share the burden of emission cuts. Poland has already declared that it would not abide by the 2050 deadline to eliminate carbon emissions, an issue EU leaders are to return to at their summit in June.
Germany also warned the commission against tightening emissions targets for vehicles, effectively seeking a waiver for automakers, newspaper Die Zeit reported.
While European legislators wrangle over the details, global temperatures keep rising and greenhouse gas emissions remain at their highest level ever. Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is expected to miss its emissions reduction targets. As Trump prepares to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement, his climate skepticism is giving cover to other leaders such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro or Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
However, Tubiana and the other activists are more optimistic than ever. They argue that public opinion worldwide might have reached a tipping point. The EU’s commitment to eliminate emissions by 2050 is the start of a broader shift with the power to bend the emissions curve from its current, dangerous trajectory.
“It’s all about momentum,” Tubiana said. “There are magical moments when everything lines up. We’re living one of these moments at a European level.”
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