some elected officials denounce an error of judgment, others call for a review of the Green deal
A global agreement to limit global temperature rise remains “the best hope for all humanity”, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a day later that Donald Trump ordered the United States out of the Paris Agreement on his first day back in the White House.
“All continents will need to accelerate the transition to net zero and address the growing burden of climate change.”Ms von der Leyen told world leaders and the business elite who had descended on the exclusive Swiss mountain resort for the annual gathering.
“Its impact is impossible to ignore: heat waves in Asia, floods from Brazil to Indonesia, from Africa to Europe, forest fires in Canada, Greece and California, hurricanes in the United States and in the Caribbean,” she added.
European Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, who is also in Davos, reacted to Ms von der Leyen’s comments by regretting Mr Trump’s decision.
“It is truly regrettable that the world’s largest economy, and one of our closest allies in the fight against climate change, is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement,” Hoekstra said, emphasizing that science on climate change was “crystal clear”.
“The Paris Agreement is built on solid foundations and is here to stay,” said Hoekstra, who is expected to propose a new target for greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 later this year. , which EU scientists say must be at least 90% lower than 1990 levels.
The United States will soon join Iran, Yemen and North Korea outside the 2015 agreement to limit temperature increases to “well less” than 2°C above the average over of the half century that separates us from 1900, the date of the end of the pre-industrial era. After reaching a new record last year, the world is already on the verge of exceeding the 1.5°C limit it aspires to.
In one of dozens of executive orders signed on the day of his inauguration, Mr. Trump wants the United States to withdraw from any environmental agreement that “directs American taxpayer dollars to countries that do not need financial assistance or who do not deserve it”, and also calls for an end to funding for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which oversees the implementation of the Paris Agreement and the annual COP summits .
Trump withdrew the United States from the climate pact during his first presidency, before Joe Biden reversed this decision in 2020.
“We’ve been there before,” responded Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, during another roundtable in Davos today, and “the door remains open” if the United States wants to rejoin to the agreement. “The world is undergoing an energy transition that cannot be stopped,” Mr. Stiell said. “Last year alone, more than $2 trillion was spent on the transition, compared to $1 trillion for fossil fuels.
Mr. Trump addressed the issue of fossil fuels in another executive order aimed at “liberating” America’s enormous oil and gas reserves, which he called “liquid gold” in his inauguration speech and he would use to lower energy prices at home and export them “around the world”. Furthermore, it prohibited the issuance of new permits for onshore and offshore wind farms.
MEP Michael Bloss, head of industrial and climate policy for the Greens, said Mr Trump was “deliberately breaking with the world order”, but also criticized Ms von der Leyen’s desire to “take the lead” of global climate action in the face of this “foreseeable development”. A word is missing here
“If Europe is to maintain its economic and geopolitical autonomy, it now needs a determined industrial strategy that specifically promotes innovation, accelerates transformation and returns Europe to the global stage as a single entity,” Mr. Bloss said.
The center-right European People’s Party (EPP), usually seen by the Greens as the biggest opponent of EU environmental policy, was also concerned.
“We are committed to the Paris climate agreement, we want to be climate neutral by 2050, (and) we want Europe to be the first climate neutral continent in the world,” said David McAllister, a lawmaker from PPE, to Euronews.
The Green Deal, which has seen the adoption of a series of climate and environmental laws over the past five years, is “the way forward”, the German lawmaker said, while adding that the position from his group is that all of this needs to be reviewed to ensure that it does not hinder our competitiveness.
Tonino Picula, a Croatian MEP from the Socialists and Democrats group, said he saw “worrying” signs of the “Trump way of thinking” in the EU. “We can find in many corners of the European Union (…) many people who think that the Green Deal is something abstract and that it is not important in (their) daily life ” he said.
Adam Bieland, a Polish lawmaker from the eurosceptic ECR party, said Mr Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement on the first day of his presidency had been the “sovereign decision of a new administration”. He criticized EPP-aligned European Council President Donald Tusk for rejecting the idea of a special summit on EU-US relations launched by Polish President Andrzej Duda.