On Monday 20 January, as Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term as President of the United States, several members of the European Parliament voiced their concerns about the pursuit of climate ambitions on the international stage.
“Over the last five years, the European Union, with strong support from the Greens, has started to turn the European Green Deal from vision into action. Trump would take us backwards”, warned the co-president of the European Green Party, Ciarán Cuffe (Irish).
In a press release, the party called on the European Union to “stand on its own two feet, to fight both climate collapse and the rise of autocrats”.
The party’s second co-president, Vula Tsetsi (Greek), said that “through his European allies, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni and other far-right politicians, Trump is threatening democracy in the European Union and its values of respect and unity”.
The European People’s Party (EPP) spokesman on environmental policy, Peter Liese (German), also acknowledged that climate policy in the “Trump 2.0” era would be “extremely challenging”.
The Christian Democrat has no doubt that Trump will withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, as he did during his first term, and says he is “sadly convinced that the 1.5 degree target will not be sustainable in the long term”, given his expected policy on climate protection in general.
However, he called for “not giving up”, saying that international policy had outlived Trump in his first term between 2017 and 2021.
“Even if international debates become tougher and the 1.5 degree objective is no longer achievable, it is still worth fighting for”, he explained, calling for “a much more intelligent approach to our climate protection policy”, in particular by reducing bureaucracy, as envisaged by the new European Commission. (Original version in French by Pauline Denys)