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EU Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero and Clean Growth, Wopke Hoekstra, says the EU plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040 is an opportunity to “build bridges” with Africa and Latin America.
Part of the proposal allows the use so-called carbon credits where Brussels pays third countries to cut their pollution levels instead of decarbonising in the EU.
The carbon credits will make 3% contribution to emission reductions, but critics argue the idea is short-sighted and its effectiveness is hard to verify.
Furthermore, there are concerns that countries paid to absorb EU greenhouse emissions will be unable to meet their own targets under the Paris Climate Accord, in addition to slowing economic growth.
“In this hugely complicated geopolitical world, there is a lot of value also for us in building more bridges with our friends in Africa, Latin America,” Hoekstra told Euronews.
“The presumption is that there some sort of a discrepancy between, on the one hand, economic growth and on the other hand climate action and our job is to make sure that we continue with climate action but do so in a way that works for our people, works for companies and works for our economy,” he said.
Hoekstra said global warming is a “man-made” issue which will become worse before it gets better, particularly in Europe.
“The impact on our societies, on our people, on all our businesses, on our communities in terms of floods, in terms wildfires is very, very significant.”
Furthermore, he said Europe is experiencing twice the global rate of 1.5% warming.
“Europe is double that number, we’re talking about three degrees,” he said.
Hoekstra, a former Dutch foreign affairs minister, also said it was unfortunate that the Trump administration has withdrawn from key multilateral climate pacts such as the Paris Agreement.
But he says important investors will be lured to the lucrative cleantech industry despite the government abandoning the issue.
“The second largest emitter, the most formidable power across the globe in geopolitical terms, and the largest economy basically says, well, thanks but no thanks, we no longer play ball, that is of course something that has very significant consequences”, he says.
“At the same time my read is that you will see in the US that whenever an investment in for example cleantech pays off and as a side effect is also something that is good for climate, businesses are not going to stop it.”
