Europe must stand together on climate protection and not hide its light / European Parliament likely to adopt compromise on climate targets with improvements on Thursday 

“We must now stand together in Europe and not hide our light,” said Dr. Peter Liese, climate policy spokesman for the largest political group in the European Parliament (EPP, Christian Democrats), at the start of the UN Climate Change Conference in Belem. “Admittedly, it took too long for the EU to agree on future climate targets. The compromise reached by the environment ministers is not perfect, but we will achieve nothing for global climate protection if we now nitpick at the compromise and hide our light. The European Union's targets and concrete policies are still very ambitious,” Liese emphasized. As an example, he drew a comparison with Japan's 2035 target: “Japan has met the UN deadline but has set a very weak target of 60% by 2035. Even though I would have liked Europe to agree on 72.5%, as the European Parliament wanted, the range of 66 to 72% is still ambitious. In contrast, China's reduction target of 7-10% is very weak. This is particularly true when you consider that China already has higher per capita emissions than the EU.”

 
With regard to the 2040 target, Liese indicated that the European Parliament would approve the agreement reached by the environment ministers on Thursday, but with two important amendments. “The compromise reached by the environment ministers is essentially based on the idea that climate protection efforts can also be carried out abroad in the future and that these efforts can be counted towards the climate targets of the EU and its member states. I fundamentally support this idea, because there is only one global climate. However, we must ensure that this is really about climate protection without any fraud, and that we do not compromise our strategic interests. For example, in the past, climate-damaging gases, known as ‘f-gases’, were produced in China for the sole purpose of being burned, because the EU issued certificates for their combustion. This must not be allowed to happen again." 
 
Europe is also a global leader when it comes to international climate finance. The main aim of the climate summit in Belem is to show all sceptics that the world is united. So far, no one has followed Donald Trump, who withdrew from the climate protection agreement, not even his “allies in spirit” such as Javier Milei in Argentina. This is also due to the fact that the EU has made the Paris Climate Agreement the basis of the Mercosur trade agreement. 
 
Overall, the European Union is rightly taking a more pragmatic approach to climate protection than in the past, said MEP Liese: “We need to be technology-open and must enable industry to become climate-friendly, for example by ensuring sufficient availability of hydrogen and the possibility of separating and storing CO2.” 
 
However, Liese strongly criticized the statement made by certain industry leaders: “Some stakeholders from the chemical industry have called for the abolition of EU emissions trading. This demand puts them outside the realm of serious discussion. Fortunately, other representatives of the chemical industry did not support this proposal. Emissions trading is at the heart of European climate policy. Existing emissions trading for energy, industry, and aviation alone contributes 25 times as much to climate protection as the entire EU regulation for CO2 emissions from passenger cars. Even if it were abolished, the problems the chemical industry is facing would not be solved. Neither China's aggressive industrial policy nor Donald Trump's tariffs would disappear. Also industry relied too much on cheap Russian gas in the past and now pays the price for this,” Liese emphasized.