In November 2021, Frans Timmermans, then the EU’s climate chief, stood before the European Parliament in Strasbourg to report on the outcome of the Glasgow climate summit he had attended just days earlier.
Timmermans — a polarising figure often seen as the face of the EU’s climate push — reiterated an upbeat message he had delivered many times before: the EU is leading the way on climate action and the rest of the world is following.
Brussels had just unveiled the “Fit for 55,” a herculean legislative effort to slash greenhouse gas emissions ahead of 2030. Across the world, several countries were rolling out carbon taxes; powerful corporations, including oil and gas majors, were boasting about once unthinkable plans to clean up their pollution; and the continent’s renewables had just overtaken dirty fossil fuels in electricity generation.
Ultimately, there was a general sense that a green revolution had already begun, and that it was only a matter of time before electric cars hummed through Europe’s cities, clean manufacturing took over from dirtier industries, and Europeans learned to forgo their carbon-rich diets.
Four years on, that optimism looks painfully naive.
Europe, once eager to showcase its climate leadership, now says it has bigger fish to fry. War, energy shocks, and a bruising cost-of-living crisis — combined with Donald Trump’s return to the White House — have pushed climate down the agenda.
With less than a month to go before a crucial COP30 summit in Brazil, EU countries are still scrambling to agree on fresh 2035 climate targets — a legal obligation under both the Paris Agreement and the bloc’s own climate legislation.
“We continue to be the adults in the room, but there’s a different tune playing in the EU,” a senior European Commission official told The Parliament on condition of anonymity. The official admitted that while the EU continues to push for climate action abroad, at home it faces pressure from member states increasingly unwilling to ask their citizens to make sacrifices in the name of fighting climate change.
“It is true that leaders' attention is just elsewhere these days,” Linda Kalcher, executive director at the Strategic Perspectives think tank, told The Parliament. “We are at a moment when we need to see if leaders are convinced that [climate] brings competitiveness [and] helps us with energy security, or if they treat it like costly climate targets,” she explained.
Since Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s new mandate began nearly a year ago, the focus on green policies that characterised her first term has been traded for economic competitiveness. It’s a shift that even pro-climate advocates have tried to embrace by framing the green transition as a path to growth and energy independence.
But right-wing leaders have increasingly rejected climate investments as a form of self-inflicted harm, no matter if man-made climate disasters have intensified in their own countries.
From ‘Paris hangover’ to climate descent
The turning point came in the autumn of 2023, when centre-right forces led by Manfred Weber, the leader of Von der Leyen’s European People’s Party (EPP), found a powerful ally in disgruntled farmers rallying against regulations they saw as an existential threat. The group’s backing unearthed deep-seated frustrations within the Commission president’s own camp over a green legislative agenda that many felt had gone too far.
The months that followed saw farmers roll tractors into city centres across the EU, leaving mountains of sewage unceremoniously piled up on the streets. Then came the results of last year’s European Parliament elections, confirming what many observers had long suspected: even as the centre held, far-right groups were no longer a political anomaly.
In a letter sent to budding conservatives, French MEP and far-right leader Jordan Bardella explicitly called earlier this year for a "temporary suspension of the Green Deal,” arguing it “would allow us to reevaluate its objectives, without destroying our continent’s prospects for prosperity.”
A decade after the landmark Paris Agreement — which committed nearly 200 countries to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees — political will on fighting climate change appears to have stalled, if not reversed.
“We were still waking up from the Paris hangover,” the Commission official said.
When Von der Leyen first became Commission chief in 2019, she inherited what the official described as the “greenest Parliament in history.”
Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, an energy researcher turned MEP for the Socialists & Democrats (S&D) group recalled that “five years ago, the debate was whether to call it a climate urgency or a climate emergency.”
Only the optimism of that time can explain how, for a brief moment, even Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 looked like a catalyst for the green revolution. When the war quickly resulted in reduced Russian gas flows to the bloc, many energy experts argued that it would inadvertently spur Europe to phase out fossil fuels at a much faster pace.
Needless to say, that magical thinking didn't last. Higher energy prices, rising inflation, and an uncertain geopolitical landscape instead led to climate fatigue, according to the Commission official.
While the war in Ukraine put an end to Europe’s addiction to Russian gas, it simultaneously unleashed a flurry of fossil-fuel subsidies meant to keep energy prices low, prompting new investments in liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Europe's Green dreams face reality check
More broadly, the EU’s energy transition was also slowing as decarbonisation at scale became more politically complicated to implement.
Kalcher, the think tanker, said the internal pushback was to be expected — especially since Europe was past most of the ‘easier’ victories, such as replacing coal with clean power.
“We are now getting to the harder part of the transition, where houses need to be renovated, the agriculture sector has to do something, where an industry that is already stressed ... has to be decarbonised,” she said.
While Europe remains on track to cut emissions by 55% by 2050 — with 2023 levels already 37% below those of 1990 — progress has been uneven, as the transport and agriculture sectors have reduced emissions by only a few percentage points. Most of the bloc's emission cuts have taken place in power generation due to a surge in renewable energy.
On top of that, a series of geopolitical headaches — from China’s tightening grip on critical minerals and to the ongoing war in Ukraine, resulting in higher energy costs that have hurt Europe’s competitiveness — have laid bare the bloc’s struggle to manufacture the clean energy technologies needed to make the green transition real.
That’s led green champions like Germany and France to cast a sceptical eye on climate targets agreed in the past, and demand that Brussels dilute them.
But Joseph Dallatte, head of the energy and climate department at the Institut Montaigne think tank, argued that rolling back targets without a plan B is a strategy destined to fail.
“Watering down objectives could be a strategy if you decide that the stick is not the right approach … but at least we have a big investment plan for the technologies that we want to manufacture in Europe,” he told The Parliament.
The risk, he said, is that without a serious plan to tackle climate change, as the continent heats up twice as fast as the rest of the globe, the EU will have no choice but to deepen its reliance on Beijing, the world’s top provider of solar panels, electric vehicles, and rare earths.
"Europe is in a situation where it has to decide whether it wants to decarbonise by itself, or whether it wants to be a mere customer of its decarbonisation,” said Dallatte, pointing to the meteoric rise of Chinese electric cars on European roads.
The EU's road to Belém
As policymakers, business leaders, activists, and experts prepare to descend on Belém, Brazil, next month, many will be watching Europe closely to see whether its internal divisions have undermined its strong voice for climate action on the global stage. COP30 also comes less than a year since Trump again pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, further undermining global coordination around climate policy.
“We are not in a very good position as Europeans,” admitted Dallatte, adding that Europe finds itself squeezed between a fiercely anti-renewable United States and a China whose hegemony in clean technologies makes competition difficult.
To Kalcher, failure to reach an agreement on 2040 targets would make the EU look “dysfunctional” and “unreliable to investors and businesses.”
European leaders are set to discuss the new climate targets they’ll present at COP30 and 2040 targets at an upcoming European Council summit on Thursday. But earlier this week, Von der Leyen sought to reassure EU leaders that decarbonisation would not come at the expense of the bloc’s economic growth.
Meanwhile, the Danish presidency of the Council of the EU has scheduled an extraordinary Environment Council for early November in an effort to secure a last-minute agreement ahead of COP30.
But that may not be enough to restore the bloc’s credibility on climate. As Kalcher put it, “If [the Europeans] come with a lower climate finance figure … and with a low climate target, then I would encourage them to tone down the rhetoric.”
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