For decades, European leaders have walked into international environmental meetings with the swagger of the world’s self-proclaimed climate quarterback.
On Wednesday, that image will be shattered — along with European efforts to put pressure on major polluters like China — as the European Union takes a seat on the bench.
It’s an indignity entirely of the EU’s own making.
Governments across the 27-member bloc have spent much of the year squabbling over a set of new climate targets required by European law and the 2015 Paris Agreement.
U.N. deadlines have been ignored. And when dozens of global leaders are expected to announce hard pledges on Wednesday at what’s billed as a last-straw U.N. summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will show up in New York carrying nothing but an IOU.
The shift has dismayed those hoping the EU would fill the void in climate talks left by the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
“It’s kind of time to put your money where your mouth is and really step up and show leadership in this very complex geopolitical climate,” said Ilana Seid, an ambassador from Palau who chairs a negotiating bloc of 39 nations that are immediately threatened by rising sea levels and coral reef collapse, referring to the EU.
Global climate affairs were once a theater where the EU spoke with an outsized voice. But its internal divisions will undermine the bloc’s influence, especially when it comes to efforts to sway China, the world’s largest polluter, said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington.
“Many in China now characterize the EU as a middle power,” he said.
Diplomats and officials from other countries said their impression was that the EU was so inwardly focused that it was difficult to get the bloc to engage with an area it had once cherished as a geopolitical weapon.
“You can’t get anyone in the EU to pay an ounce of attention to this,” said one diplomat from a close EU ally.
This sense of dismay has even reached typically reserved senior U.N. officials.
During a briefing with reporters last week, which was conducted under condition of anonymity, a U.N. official said “we understand the complexity” faced by EU political leaders. “But we are really pushing the EU as well … now is not the time for the European Union to surrender that mantle of leadership.”
Climate chaos
The egg heading for von der Leyen’s face is the result of a political turn that has made it hard for pro-climate politicians to hold on to past gains, let alone set new targets.
In the wake of a much-vaunted “green wave” in the 2019 European Parliament election, the EU legally committed to eliminating climate change-causing pollution by 2050. Since then, the pendulum has swung back, and the EU’s national governments have fallen out over how fast to get there.
A combination of political and economic factors drives Europe’s indecision. These include the high costs of energy and related industrial stagnation, a militarization drive that is sucking funding from green initiatives, and an increasingly confident far-right populism that threatens to displace centrists in many EU countries.
Emmanuel Macron once posed as the counterweight to Donald Trump’s trashing of the Paris Agreement. But this year the French president has waged a behind-the-scenes campaign to delay the new climate goals. His government faces an unprecedented challenge from far-right politicians who say they would scrap the EU’s green policy. Electoral math has also fed resistance in Poland and Czechia.
“The EU is and will remain a global climate leader,” Denmark’s climate minister, Lars Aagaard, said Thursday. But, he said, Europe’s international partners understood that “it is a difficult time we are living in. I mean, there’s war on our continent.”
Talks among EU diplomats fell apart earlier this month after they failed to gain approval for a goal proposed by the European Commission to cut emissions by 90 percent by 2040. That, in turn, meant that EU countries were unable to agree on the intermediate 2035 target required by the U.N. under the Paris Agreement.
Faced with the prospect of being barred from speaking at the U.N. summit last Thursday, EU ministers hurriedly agreed to send von der Leyen to New York with a “statement of intent” in lieu of the required target.
In a document that has no weight in law, they indicated a possible landing zone for a deal to cut climate pollution by between 66.3 percent and 72.5 percent below 1990 levels by 2035. They also guaranteed to arrive at a hard target before the COP30 climate conference in November.
Those responsible for the fudge have tried to sell it as leadership-as-usual for the EU. Speaking to the press after Thursday’s deal, EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra was adamant the statement would “be perceived as a huge step forward.”
“I don’t think we should feel embarrassed,” Poland’s deputy climate minister, Krzysztof Bolesta, said flatly.
Others disagreed. Turning up without a new target was, in fact, “embarrassing,” said Linda Kalcher, executive director of the Brussels-based Strategic Perspectives think tank. The statement was only a “hard-fought consolation prize” that would save the EU from being excluded altogether.
China strategy
European mortification was by no means the end of it, said the Asia Society’s Li. The EU’s internal disarray effectively hands China a free pass.
Over the last two decades, the EU has seen itself as a third power in climate affairs, driving forward other countries even as the two biggest economies, China and the U.S., moved more cautiously.
“They were the front wheel of the climate tricycle,” said Li.
In contrast to the EU, which has traditionally targeted sharp pollution cuts and then relied on others to follow suit, China has tended to underpromise so it can overdeliver.
Experts are increasingly convinced that China’s pollution may peak this year, five years ahead of an official 2030 target that is viewed in Europe as hopelessly weak. Beijing is expected to announce a new target this week for the rate of decline in its emissions over the coming decade. European envoys and former Biden administration officials have pushed for China to target a 30 percent decline. However, few observers believe Beijing will even come close to that number.
If China disappoints as expected, “the European Union will not be in the position to comment, or at least comment credibly,” said Li. That demonstrates in visceral terms how Europe’s internal divisions have led to its “losing political influence” globally, he said.
The EU’s power in climate talks has often relied on a coalition with small island countries, for whom rapid cuts to emissions are the only acceptable goal. But heading into the COP30 conference, those traditional allies are now looking to China for leadership.
Alongside its huge coal power sector, China is the dominant clean energy player. That is not only translating to a huge growth in domestic renewable energy: Chinese firms have booked investments worth at least $210 billion in clean manufacturing projects outside China since 2022, according to a report from the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins University. In real terms, it surpasses the Marshall Plan in scale.
“One of the things that we recognize is China has a lot to benefit from keeping the Paris Agreement alive,” said Seid, the ambassador from Palau. She said her country’s president had personally lobbied Macron. “There’s a lot of political work that’s being done to really try to have the EU step up.”
Karl Mathiesen reported from London. Zia Weise reported from Brussels. Sara Schonhardt reported from Washington. Louise Guillot contributed to this report from Brussels.
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