European Union Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said the United States\u2019 retreat on green commitments will damage the potential for global impact as well as the overall mood at the upcoming COP30 talks in Brazil, but that it points to new \u201cpartnerships and opportunities\u201d for other nations to forge progress. <\/p>\n
The U.S. said on Friday that it will not send high-level officials to the United Nations-sponsored events, which start this week in the Amazon city of Bel\u00e9m. President Trump in January initiated the country\u2019s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the global accord to address climate change, a process that takes a year. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re talking about the largest, the most dominant, most important geopolitical player from the whole world. It is the second-largest emitter,\u201d Hoekstra said of the U.S., in an interview in Toronto on Saturday. \u201cSo if a player of that magnitude basically says, \u2018Well, I\u2019m going to leave and have it all sorted out by the rest of you,\u2019 clearly that does damage.\u201d<\/p>\n
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer have confirmed their attendance at COP30, while French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz are expected to confirm in coming days. <\/p>\n
While describing the U.S. absence from COP30 as a \u201cwatershed moment,\u201d Hoekstra, the EU\u2019s climate chief and a former minister in the Netherlands, pointed to the continuing engagement of many U.S. governors and mayors on climate issues. He also cited the ongoing business case for decarbonization.<\/p>\n
American companies \u201cmight no longer write the C word in capitals,\u201d he said, referring to climate. \u201cBut if there is a business case to continue with solar or batteries or wind, and that business case is sound, well, what do business people do? They try to reap these benefits, and rightly so.\u201d <\/p>\n
COP30 organizers haven\u2019t laid out a main goal or deal going into the talks. The first such summit to be held in the Amazon rainforest, it is set to focus on implementation, or turning policies into tangible outcomes. Hoekstra said he hopes for three key achievements: steps to close the gap between current climate policies and what scientists say is needed to limit temperature rise; action to scale up carbon markets; and for countries to \u201cget concrete\u201d about climate adaptation. <\/p>\n
Most countries missed the deadline to submit their climate pledges to the U.N. ahead of the talks, and a recent analysis found those pledges would result in emissions cuts far lower than what\u2019s needed to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.<\/p>\n
While the EU is a leader on ambitious climate policy with a binding target of net zero emissions by 2050, it hasn\u2019t yet submitted its own pledge, or Nationally Determined Contribution, for 2035. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf you are more than walking the talk yourself, you always have an easier conversation,\u201d Hoekstra said. At COP30, the EU \u201ccan motivate, we can build coalitions, we can bring others into the tent,\u201d he said. But he noted that the 27 countries in the bloc together only account for a small fraction of the world\u2019s annual emissions.<\/p>\n
That means \u201cthere is no alternative for the others, amongst roughly the group of the G20, to take action themselves,\u201d said Hoekstra. <\/p>\n
The world\u2019s biggest greenhouse gas polluter, China, submitted a NDC that was largely seen as modest. Hoekstra described China\u2019s climate policies as having \u201cpluses and minuses,\u201d noting he\u2019s particularly worried about the superpower\u2019s coal-plant-building push, which risks locking in future fossil fuel use. \u201cIt would be very important for the world if they would actually refrain from that,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
And its NDC, he said, is inadequate. \u201cMost experts were hoping for an NDC north of 30% [in reductions], or at least something around 20%,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then an NDC that is in all likelihood below 10%? I mean, even with all the diplomatic language I would love to wrap around that, it\u2019s hard to see how that is enough.\u201d <\/p>\n
China has a carbon market, and Brazil is going into COP with a proposal for the voluntary integration of such markets to accelerate decarbonization. Hoekstra hailed carbon markets as \u201can idea for which the time has come\u201d: \u201cIt\u2019s non-ideological. It is hugely impactful,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I think we can push that even further in terms of its acceptance, but also in terms of its scope\u201d at COP30. <\/p>\n
In the decade since the Paris Agreement, the world has \u201cmanaged to get rid of the most extreme scenarios\u201d for climate change \u201csimply because of the action we\u2019ve collectively taken,\u201d said Hoekstra. But major damage still lies ahead without stronger measures.<\/p>\n
\u201cClimate change will become a harsh economic reality,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you look at what happened in Slovenia in the summer of 2023, they got hit by floods and the impact was roughly 11% of GDP. And every single year we see more of these types of events, and no one knows who will be hit next year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bochove writes for Bloomberg, with contributions from Bloomberg\u2019s John Ainger, Laura Millan and Ewa Krukowska.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"European Union Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said the United States\u2019 retreat on green commitments will damage the potential…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":545001,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[10281,55811,1395,2311,71617,4094,175188,5035,2000,299,5187,1699,175186,90883,175189,10849,175190,175187],"class_list":{"0":"post-545000","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-action","9":"tag-carbon-market","10":"tag-china","11":"tag-climate-change","12":"tag-cop30","13":"tag-country","14":"tag-current-climate-policy","15":"tag-emission","16":"tag-eu","17":"tag-europe","18":"tag-european","19":"tag-european-union","20":"tag-hoekstra","21":"tag-ndc","22":"tag-other-nation","23":"tag-talk","24":"tag-watershed-moment","25":"tag-whole-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115482432161938177","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/545001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}