From Britain to Germany, Europe’s mainstream party leaders are scrambling to respond to the surge in support for Green parties — and to the growing public anxiety about the possible consequences of global climate change, VOA news reports.
The Greens surged in last month’s European Parliament elections with 48% of voters identifying climate change as their top worry. Opinion polls in Germany now put the Greens ahead of Angela Merkel’s storied Christian Democratic Party, which along with its junior partner in the country’s governing coalition is racing to sharpen climate policies.
In Britain, outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May, with the backing of most of the Conservative hopefuls vying to replace her, announced last week a hugely ambitious carbon-reduction goal, enshrining into law a pledge to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, making Britain the first major economy to do so.
She said: “This country led the world in innovation during the Industrial Revolution, and now we must lead the world to a cleaner, greener form of growth. Standing by is not an option. Reaching net zero by 2050 is an ambitious target but it is crucial that we achieve it to ensure we protect our planet for future generations.”
Other European countries are following suit, and some smaller countries, including Finland and Norway, are going for earlier dates than 2050 to become net-zero greenhouse gas producers, but they have so far have not made their goals legally binding.
But delivering on radical climate action will be much more complicated and harder than politicians are letting on, and it is not clear Europeans are ready to make the sacrifices necessary for a carbon-free future, warn some analysts and critics of radical climate action.
In an opinion poll in Britain after May’s announcement respondents said they were not willing to help fund the government’s promise to reach the 2050 emissions goal, which will cost the country between $26 billion to $52 billion, estimates suggest. That is around one to two percent of Britain’s GDP.
Asked whether they would support the government raising taxes to fund its pledge, 41% said they would not, with only 36% willing to pay higher taxes. And respondents were especially hostile in the Sky Data poll to the idea of cutting public services for the money. Just 8% percent supported doing so, with 74% opposed.
Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish economist and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, thinks the costs for Britain to reach its zero-emission goal will be much higher. He points to New Zealand’s government, which is also thinking about adopting a 2050 benchmark, and believes it could cost advanced economies as much as 16% of their GDPs to rid themselves within 30 years of fossil fuels.
Other energy experts warn climate action is not being sufficiently thought through by panicky European governments and may have little effect in reducing overall global warming.
“The story for the past 20 years is that in Europe we have been de-industrializing , and we’ve been swapping home production for imports, so even though it looks to the contrary [our policies] have been increasing global warming,” Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Britain’s Oxford University told the BBC.
That point has been picked up by climate activists and environmental groups, too, who while welcoming climate action say the various European plans are not taking into account the outsourcing of manufacturing and are attempting to cheat nature. And they also slam European governments for relying on international carbon credits, where a country can pay for cuts elsewhere in lieu of domestic emissions. to reach their goals.
Greenpeace says the Europeans are merely shifting manufacturing to Asia and developing nations, where labor is cheaper and goods are produced with high carbon outputs, normally electricity generated by coal. “This type of offsetting has a history of failure,” says Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace’s British affiliate.
Merkel’s ailing grand coalition government says it will decide finally by September on how to sharpen climate policies when it is due to enshrine into law a commitment to ensure that. by 2030, carbon emissions will be 55% lower than their 1990 level. But the coalition parties, business and environmentalists are squabbling about the details and whether there should be a carbon tax, which could be used partly to compensate poorer Germans for higher costs.
Germany has already missed a 2020 target for the reduction of emissions that was agreed with the EU — a major embarrassment for Merkel who liked it when she was at one time dubbed the “climate chancellor.” Germany is highly dependent on coal for its energy and had intended to shift more to nuclear power, but Berlin abandoned that idea in the wake of Japan’s 2011 nuclear disaster.
The German government has also faced strong resistance from a powerful motorist lobby — as a well as automakers — to higher fuel prices and an abrupt shift to electric cars. It has only had to look to its neighbor, France, where the Yellow Vest agitation was sparked in rural areas by higher fuel taxes to realize the political danger.