Members of the European Parliament’s Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) appeared divided over the new EU climate target to be set for 2030 on Thursday 28 May, during a debate on the draft report by Jytte Guteland (S&D, Sweden) on the European Commission’s proposed Climate Law (see EUROPE 12439/2).
In her report (see EUROPE 12483/11), Mrs Guteland advocates a European objective of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to -65% below 1990 levels. This is a significant increase over the -50% or -55% target which the Commission intends to propose by September, once its impact study has been finalised (the current target is -40%).
Justifying this choice, she explained to her colleagues that this ambitious objective corresponds to the recommendations of the scientists, if the EU wants to respect its commitments under the Paris Agreement. “If you look at the ‘UN environmental program emissions gap report 2019’, we have to reduce the emissions with 7.6% per year, and start now, to be faithful to the 1.5 degrees in the Paris agreement”, she said.
While this proposal was welcomed by the members of the Greens/EFA, S&D and GUE/NGL groups who spoke, the other groups either expressed serious reservations (EPP, Renew Europe) or indicated their intention to oppose such an objective (ID, ECR).
Being pragmatic, the coordinator for Renew Europe, Nils Torvalds (Finland), felt that it is preferable to advocate a reduction of at least 55% to ensure that there is a large majority behind this target.
However, he said he was aware that a 55% reduction by 2030 is not in line with the Paris Agreement. However, if efforts prove insufficient, there will still be time to rectify the situation by setting a more ambitious target for 2040.
For Peter Liese (EPP, Germany), “[the target of] 65% is far too much and it would never get any consensus, also in the EU Council”.
The Czech Alexandr Vondra (ECR), for his part, invited Mrs Guteland to reconsider her proposal.
A European panel on climate change. MEPs also expressed rather opposing views on the proposal to establish an independent advisory group of scientists at EU level to assess EU climate policies and make recommendations.
Like Catherine Chabaud (Renew Europe, France), some MEPs felt that the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is sufficient and therefore do not see any real added value in this panel.
Participating in the discussion, the representative of the Commission shared that view. In the Commission representative’s view, scientific advice is already sufficiently taken into account in the formation of European climate policies thanks to the work of the IPCC and the European Environment Agency (EEA).
On the other hand, the latter did not react directly to Mrs Guteland’s proposal for the 2030 objective, simply ensuring that the objective of -50% or -55% defended by the Commission takes account of scientific assessments.
Unanimous opposition to delegated acts. Finally, the political groups, on the other hand, unanimously supported the point in the report which opposes the Commission’s proposal to use delegated acts to set climate objectives between 2030 and 2050 (see EUROPE 12438/3).
In their view, such a provision would give too much power to the Commission, thus weakening democracy, and would also be contrary to the Treaties (see EUROPE 12474/21). This possibility was also unanimously rejected by the Member States on Monday (see EUROPE 12493/18).
The ENVI Committee vote on this report is scheduled for 10 September and the plenary vote is scheduled for October. (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)