EPP holds trump card after far right seizes control of EU climate bill
Last week, the European Commission proposed that by 2040 the bloc's net greenhouse gas emissions should be 90% lower than in 1990. The European Parliament and the Council of the EU – which represents national governments – can amend the proposal before adopting it.
Time is of the essence as a deal on the 2040 target is politically linked to the decision on the contribution to the global climate effort that Europe has to pledge before the United Nations' COP30 climate change conference opens in November.
But with the file in the hands of the climate-sceptic Patriots group, lawmakers who support the ambitious reduction in emissions fear it will be impossible to meet this deadline using the normal legislative procedure.
Patriots chair Jordan Bardella, who presides over Marine Le Pen's right-wing National Rally in France, said today that his group was 'resolutely opposed' to the plan to cut emissions by 90%.
His group would not abandon industry and ordinary citizens to the "harmful influence of the left and the ecologists', Bardella said. His group later declared that Europe's Green Deal policy needed "a complete reset" rather than "cosmetic adjustments".
The Patriots dismissed calls to rush through the legislation as a 'direct attempt to bypass parliamentary scrutiny, avoid a transparent committee process, and block any meaningful revision of the Green Transition'.
The group, which is also home to Spain's Vox and Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán's Fidesz, called on the centre-right European People's Party (EPP) to join them. Conservatives hold the key As the largest group in the European Parliament, the EPP will be decisive in any vote on whether to use the urgency procedure to accelerate the passage of the climate bill.
Green and centrist lawmakers say the EPP allowed the far-right group the to seize control of the bill by failing to outbid the Patriots in an auction-like process used to assign legislative files in the parliament.
The Greens withdrew a unilateral call for an urgent procedure so they could submit a joint request with centrist groups in the hope of securing the EPP's support, the Austrian Green Lena Schilling said. Scenarios If the bill is fast-tracked, the role of the rapporteur nominated by the nationalist group would be 'very limited', said the liberal Renew group lawmaker Pascal Canfin, a former environment committee chair.
'The Patriots can be outmanoeuvred and we will do everything we can to outmanoeuvre them because … they will just sabotage everything in order to not have climate protection,' said the green lawmaker Michael Bloss
According to him, the Environment Committee in the European Parliament could discuss the amendments to the European Commission proposal already next week.
The pro-Green alliance could then agree compromises on the Commission proposal and vote at committee level by early October.
Canfin envisaged the possibility of the Parliament's Environment Committee voting for the same position agreed by EU governments in the Council. This would clearly indicate the will of the two institutions even if final negotiations were still pending.
However, sources close to the EPP have told Euractiv that the group would vote against initiating a fast-track procedure on Wednesday – possibly reconsidering after the summer, depending on whether the Patriots do any real work on the file.
Such a delay would, at the very least. make it more difficult to secure agreement on the EU law in time for COP30. UN pledge Denmark, which chairs ministerial talks in the Council of the EU until December, recently said that it wants to agree on the 2040 climate goal well ahead of COP30, so the required 2035 pledge can be based on it.
The EU could still present its 2035 emission reduction promise to the UN without agreeing on the 2040 target.
But it would likely be less ambitious if based on the existing EU climate law, which commits the bloc to net-zero emissions by mid-century but does not set out the pathway to reach that goal.
*Eddy Wax contributed reporting
(rh, aw)
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