Susi Dennison, Rafael Loss, Jenny Söderström
They have different views on issues such as the proposed carbon border adjustment mechanism, the role of nuclear energy in Europe’s future energy mix, bridging technologies in the transition to net zero, and the socio-economic consequences of closing down carbon-intensive industries.
Member states are not divided into two diametrically opposed camps but rather agree or disagree with one another in varying constellations.
This makes the implementation of the European Green Deal an intricate puzzle – yet achievable if coalitions of states push one another to implement its constituent parts.
The EU needs a strong foreign policy strategy to manage the geopolitical dimension of the deal and to generate the political resolve to drive climate action.
The bloc also needs to mitigate the socio-economic challenges of implementing the European Green Deal if the effort is to succeed.
Introduction
EU climate action is increasingly political. As with migration after the 2015 surge in refugee arrivals in the European Union, and health cooperation as the covid-19 crisis intensified in 2020, climate policy is no longer the preserve of ministers in its thematic Council formation – the Environment Council configuration (ENVI). Rather, the issue makes ever more regular appearances on the agendas of heads of state and government.
This is because the European Green Deal is a high-risk, high-reward gambit. Member states are awaiting the European Commission’s legislative package for implementing the deal. They know that, if they fail to transform their economies and societies to promote ambitious climate action globally, it will become much harder for the international community to limit global warming to 1.5oC above pre-industrial levels. However, if Europeans reduce their carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 in a socially just way, this could provide a platform for the EU to become a global leader on climate norms and green technology.
If EU member states are to meet the challenges in the implementation of this ambitious package in the coming years, they will first need to understand one another’s differing approaches to climate issues. They are already familiar with the stereotypes about Nordic green leaders and carbon-intensive industry in central and eastern European states, but the reality is more complex. And member states’ perspectives on climate are shaped by a range of factors other than the current energy mix and levels of efficiency.
To better understand these challenges, the European Council on Foreign Relations’ associate researchers asked policymakers, analysts, and opinion-shapers in all 27 EU capitals about climate issues. The study, conducted in January and February 2021, used a standardised questionnaire to discover the drivers of each country’s climate policy.
This paper maps the national politics of the European Green Deal, using data from both the study and a public opinion poll that ECFR commissioned Datapraxis and YouGov to carry out in nine EU member states in November 2020. The paper shows that Europeans are divided over a range of climate issues, including the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), the role of nuclear energy in Europe’s future energy mix, bridging technologies with which to facilitate the transition to net zero, and the socio-economic consequences of closing down carbon-intensive industries. Luckily, these fault lines do not separate member states into two diametrically opposed camps. Rather, Europeans find themselves agreeing and disagreeing with one another in varying constellations. This setup makes the implementation of the European Green Deal an intricate puzzle. But it also allows for creative coalition management to produce lasting success, as countries that are sceptical of the deal see some opportunities on the horizon. The paper shows how policymakers can bring member states’ differing perspectives together to underpin strong European engagement with climate geopolitics.
The challenges and risks of the European Green Deal
No EU government can claim that climate change has taken it by surprise. In recent decades, the impact of increasing global temperatures on agricultural output, weather-related natural disasters, and migration and conflict patterns has been increasingly visible across the world, including in the EU.
However, some governments have been responding more quickly than others. The chart below plots the share of renewable energy in each state’s energy mix in 2019 against the change in this share between 2009 and 2019. Sweden, Finland, and Denmark – which are also climate frontrunners according to ECFR’s latest EU Coalition Explorer – have been putting in the groundwork to expand renewable sources of electricity generation quite rapidly in the last decade. Meanwhile, member states such as Latvia and Austria have been moving more slowly, albeit after starting from a relatively high base. Estonia, Portugal, Lithuania, and Italy are working hard to catch up. The group in the bottom left-hand corner – including the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Poland – still has some way to go and, so far, has felt much less compelled to make progress than others. Interestingly, large EU member states France, Germany, and Spain have not been doing much better.
Nonetheless, increasing the use of renewable energy is only part of the journey to net zero. In addition to accelerating the use of carbon-neutral electricity generation, reducing the emission of greenhouse gases from industrial production, transport, and other economic activity is a central goal of the green transition. In pursuit of this goal, the European Green Deal is designed to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions.
Between 2008 and 2018, Denmark achieved a 25 per cent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, the second most significant among EU27 countries, while also experiencing above-average GDP growth. Only Greece’s decline in emissions went further – although this was largely due to the collapse of its economy. Greece and Italy were the EU’s only two countries to record a lower GDP in 2018 than in 2008. But whereas the latter shrank by a mere 0.4 per cent, the former’s declined by 25 per cent. The gap between Greece and the EU27 average was 36 percentage points. Poland, Estonia, and Latvia were the bloc’s only member states whose greenhouse-gas emissions increased over the course of the decade, although their economic output did too. Still, 22 EU countries succeeded in both reducing their emissions and increasing their GDP, albeit with varying efficiency.
These differences help explain why, as ECFR’s survey finds, there is a range of thinking across member states about the national challenges and risks in the implementation of the European Green Deal.
Socio-economic challenges and risks
The most prevalent concern – apparent in 19 member states – comes from socio-economic challenges such as the prospect of rising unemployment caused by the closure of carbon-intensive industries. Socio-economic factors also feature as the biggest perceived risks associated with the green deal, with 15 countries expressing worries about higher costs for energy and fuel, and ten about declining living standards, such as those caused by reductions in the consumption of certain goods or electricity shortages. And nine countries are concerned about political instability resulting from public discontent with the implementation of the deal.
These findings confirm the need for the Just Transition Mechanism – though this is small, and only intended to fill specific gaps – and other forms of planned EU support to mitigate the socio-economic consequences of the green transition. The key point is that EU budget funds can and should be spent differently. For example, the EU should use European Social Fund money to train workers for jobs that are environmentally and economically sustainable in the long term. While one should not underestimate the scale of these challenges, they provide the EU with an important opportunity to set a global example.
Both opposition and support from industry and the business community
Predictably, countries also face opposition to the European Green Deal from companies (as ECFR researchers in 11 countries reported). This is because carbon-intensive industries are forced to fundamentally change their production models, invest in new technologies, or – in some cases, such as coal power – close down. There are clear divisions within the various sectors, with the best performers poised to make a technological leap and waiting for a clear regulatory signal, while others are struggling even in the current scenario, let alone in a low-carbon one. Companies that generate fossil-fuel and nuclear electricity tend to be much more centralised and well-resourced than renewables firms, often making them better able to mobilise against unwanted state interventions.
Encouragingly, however, there is support from the business community for the European Green Deal in 17 countries, as it sees new economic opportunities in the green transition. Individual countries face a mixture of opposition and support from various sectors, usually according to their dependence on fossil fuels or their ability to adapt or gain from the transition. This is the case both in frontrunner countries and in states that are lagging in the transition. In private discussions, these authors have learnt that major industries seem willing to adapt, even where the government is reluctant to engage in the green transition. This is also the case for state-owned enterprises. A sector’s openness to external competition might be the determining factor here: where such enterprises face private or international competition, they might be more willing to innovate than are governments.
National governments’ willingness and capacity
The other two main domestic challenges are linked to national governments’ willingness and capacity to implement the European Green Deal. In 11 countries, a lack of political will is an obstacle to the green transition. States in this category include those with relatively limited ambitions on climate and those aspiring to be European champions, such as Poland and France respectively. The French government has made tackling climate change a top priority, but was recently found guilty of failing to sufficiently reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in a lawsuit filed by a group of environmental NGOs. This is quite different from Poland, which was more vocal than any other member state in its opposition to the European Green Deal during the negotiations over the agreement. Eleven member states appear to lack the capacity to make use of available funds to green the economy. Some of the less ambitious member states – such as Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Romania – seem to have both of these problems.
Geopolitical risks
Furthermore, 12 member states see geopolitical risks in the European Green Deal. They are concerned that their strategically important industries will be overtaken by greener competitors in other member states or further afield. Meanwhile, eight countries worry that the green transition could create new energy dependencies in relation to areas ranging from imports of Russian gas to negative reactions to the CBAM, to dependence on imports of green technology from China.
Does the EU have climate leaders?
With the European Green Deal picking up steam and COP26 in Glasgow on the horizon, most EU member states are optimistic about their position in the energy transition – despite their varying risk assessments. Twenty-one member states perceive themselves as being on the front foot in the transition to renewable energy, while only six identify as laggards. This has as much to do with ambition and self-perception as with material factors such as dependence on energy imports or the availability of financial resources and administrative capacity. These self-assessments sometimes contrast with measures such as the share of renewables in member states’ energy mixes and their efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions (see Figures 1 and 2 respectively). Still, this group of 21 – which includes EU climate heavyweights such as Germany, France, and Sweden – could push forward with ambitious plans and try to persuade the six straggler states to go along.
Unfortunately, the climate leaders are not quite so unified on exactly how they should reach net zero through the European Green Deal. There are significant divisions between them on, for example, the role of nuclear energy in the continent’s future energy mix and the desirability of the CBAM. Member states have vehemently debated both issues with one another and within EU institutions. The European Commission has been ambiguous on the former and has made a high-profile commitment to (but, privately, expressed scepticism about) the adoption of the latter as early as summer 2021.
France was de facto leader of the group of member states that called for the inclusion of nuclear energy in the EU’s strategy for reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. Many capitals that see Paris as a go-to partner on the European Green Deal do so due to its support for nuclear energy. Central and eastern European countries, with which France has had somewhat troubled relationships recently, tend to want nuclear power to be part of the ‘clean’ energy mix. Many of them fear new dependencies, the loss of jobs in traditional electric power industries, or resistance from these industries’ lobbies. Eastern European countries’ affinity with France on this matter stands in stark contrast to some of the findings from ECFR’s latest EU Coalition Explorer survey, in which they registered particularly high rates of disapproval of Paris. For France, playing the nuclear card well could be one way to regain some goodwill with eastern Europeans who have expressed consternation at President Emmanuel Macron’s unilateral outreach to Moscow in recent years.
The anti-nuclear camp is somewhat bigger. It consists largely of countries that are already far along in their transitions towards renewable energy, such as Denmark, Germany, and Latvia. Germany first decided to phase out nuclear energy in 2000, then rejoined the nuclear club in 2010, before revising its decision again after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in 2011. The country’s remaining nuclear power plants are scheduled to go offline at the end of 2022. Many member states regard both Germany and France as key partners for delivering on the European Green Deal. But only Austria expressly sees Germany in this way because of its anti-nuclear stance.
Germany’s central position in EU policymaking generally seems to make it an important ally on the climate front – or, for some sceptics of the European Green Deal, a headache. Moreover, for pro-nuclear member states, Germany serves as a cautionary tale: as it phased out nuclear energy, the country has expanded its use of lignite, a particularly carbon-intensive kind of coal (although the growth of the country’s use of renewables still outpaces that of coal). Germany plans to end its use of coal-fired electricity generation with payments ending in 2043. Some policymakers in these anti-nuclear countries occasionally flirt with the nuclear solution to the climate crisis – as seen in Sweden – but anti-nuclear sentiments are widespread among their populations and political elites.
Despite the exclusion of nuclear energy from the Just Transition Fund, some member states are certain to hold on to their nuclear power plants for the time being. With China expanding its nuclear grid at unprecedented speed, many developing countries are considering the nuclear route to carbon neutrality. And with China and Russia having emerged as key providers of nuclear technology, including within the EU, the nuclear age is far from over.
The CBAM proposal is designed to prevent ‘carbon leakage’, the offshoring of energy-intensive industry to countries with lower ambitions for emissions reductions or the substitution of EU products with more carbon-intensive imports. Both would cause the EU to miss its goal to reduce global emissions and simply move them from Europe to other parts of the world, while also hurting European economies’ competitiveness. The purpose of the CBAM is to ensure that the price of imports reflects their carbon content, so that foreign products that are nominally cheaper but more carbon-intensive compete on a level playing field, and so that the EU’s international partners have incentives to pursue similarly ambitious climate action.
In many member states, there is not much of a discussion of this proposal even within the policy community. Nonetheless, the conversation has begun in several of them. And it has raised concerns about issues such as how the transition period – before the CBAM begins to have its intended long-term effects – could drive countries that export to the EU away from carbon-intensive industry. In ECFR’s study, seven countries named the need to rethink supply chains because of CBAM among the top challenges in implementing the European Green Deal. These countries are Denmark, Finland, France, Latvia, Malta, Romania, and Sweden.
Some member states, such as Denmark, reported concerns about how the CBAM would fit with the EU’s identity as a global actor: what could be perceived as a protectionist measure to ensure that EU industry remained competitive would damage the bloc’s reputation as a champion of free trade. This concern may be compounded by the possibility of retaliatory measures against EU exports by third countries. Yet member states such as Finland and France indicated that they saw the CBAM as an essential component of the European Green Deal, to reassure EU-based companies that cooperating with the transition to net zero will not undermine their competitiveness.
Regardless of member states’ level of ambition, the devil is in the detail: with the debate on CBAM just picking up steam, it will be critical for them to agree on the specifics of how to calculate various products’ carbon footprints, which industry sectors to include, and how to ensure compliance with the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Member states and EU institutions will have to find the delicate balance between ensuring fair competition and adopting increasingly ambitious environmental standards – and doing both in ways that promote global climate action.
Finally, ECFR’s survey suggests that climate leadership in the EU need not only be about size. Some smaller EU states have great potential in this area. For example, as a country that is particularly vulnerable to climate change, Greece seems to be raising its ambition and aiming to position itself in the vanguard of the transition to net zero. The country is currently involved in a pilot project with the Volkswagen group to transform one of its islands into a model of climate-neutral mobility. If Greece truly wants to establish itself as a green champion, it could team up with some of its neighbours in south-east Europe with which it shares a number of climate-related challenges – such as Bulgaria and Romania – and share best practice with them.
The Baltic states also have the ambition to be progressive on climate issues. Policymakers in Latvia and Lithuania see an opportunity to gain an international reputation as leaders on green issues. Estonia is also aspiring to become such a leader, just as it has been on the digital transformation. All three countries are doing fairly well at increasing the share of renewables in their energy mixes, with Latvia and Estonia currently planning a joint flagship project to establish offshore wind farms. Against this background, there is real potential for the Baltic states not only to become climate champions, but also to engage neighbouring Poland in a forum for sharing best practice and cooperating on the implementation of the European Green Deal.
How to transform sceptics into ‘green opportunists’
As ECFR’s new study shows, the green transition creates many economic and political opportunities for member states. Twenty-three countries appear to recognise that they can pursue such economic opportunities, either in developing or expanding the green energy sector, or in modernising other industries. This group includes both member states at the forefront of the green transition – which would take advantage of their lead – and those that could make use of the process to catch up with others.
Encouragingly, 18 out of 19 countries that associate the transition with socio-economic challenges also identify economic opportunities in the implementation of the European Green Deal. It is important that these countries make use of the available financial support for the green transition, such as the Just Transition Fund and the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility. Within this group, however, there are several countries that might lack the institutional capacity to do so, such as Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovakia (see graphic above). These states might need additional support in capacity-building or other targeted measures to facilitate their access to green transition funding, under recovery and resilience plans due to be submitted by the end of April 2021. A greater focus on the role of civil society and the private sector in implementing the European Green Deal could help close this capacity gap.
The group of countries that associate the transition with both socio-economic challenges and economic opportunities includes some that, as ECFR’s survey shows, appear to lack the political will to implement the European Green Deal. Among them are Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania. But, in these member states, ECFR’s survey and opinion polls show that there is public support for tackling climate change and for implementing targets set by the EU. In these countries, public support is below the EU average but 73-82 per cent favour policies and other measures to tackle climate change, such as increased public financial support for the transition to clean energy. And 83-87 per cent believe it is important that their national government sets ambitious targets to increase the use of renewable energy by 2030. This suggests that leaders in these countries have more room to implement such measures than they might think – especially if, in doing so, they make use of EU funding and find a way to mitigate the socio-economic risks.
Countries that opposed the European Green Deal or have been slow to tackle the climate challenge in areas such as the coal phase-out – Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia – seem to have several characteristics that could make them more ambitious in the implementation of the European Green Deal. These member states should use the opportunities provided by the agreement to modernise industries, infrastructure, and energy production that would benefit from upgrades anyway. Their implementation of the deal does not have to be based on a whole-hearted acknowledgment of the climate threat. Yet they could become ‘green opportunists’ if the EU encourages them to make use of the economic opportunities created by the deal and the Recovery and Resilience Facility. They would require support in building up their capacity to make use of the available funding, and could benefit from reminders of the significant level of public support for tackling climate change.
In discussions about the future shape of the EU and the relationship between the EU institutions and member states, Poland and Hungary are often referred to in the same breath. In the realm of energy, their governments share an enthusiasm for fossil and nuclear fuels – although Poland has been making more evident efforts, including those to develop its renewables sector. And both countries have been among the member states least interested in renewables. Since 2009, each has invested little in increasing the share of renewables in their national energy mixes. As a result, by 2019, just one-tenth of their electricity came from renewable sources (see Figure 1). And, because both governments control much of the media landscape in their respective countries, they have joined with their allies in the fossil-fuel and nuclear industries, as well as state-owned companies in other sectors, to dominate the public discourse on environmental issues. That said, ECFR’s research suggests that Hungary is slightly different from some of its neighbours. Poland’s scepticism about EU initiatives largely extends to the European Green Deal, but Hungary seems more open to participating in it, not least to benefit from its financial resources.
Relations between the EU and Hungary are riddled with conflict in most policy areas, but they see eye to eye on the need to achieve carbon neutrality. Nonetheless, for Hungary’s government, the details of how to achieve this are a matter of national sovereignty. The clash between Brussels and Budapest is particularly visible on nuclear energy. Hungary is constructing two nuclear reactors in close cooperation with Russia (and backed by a €10 billion Russian loan) to add capacity of 2,400MW to its national energy supply.
Moreover, the Fidesz government largely sees international climate policy through a business lens. Hungary has appointed an ambassador-at-large for energy and climate. But, in recent years, the country’s climate diplomacy under Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has emphasised trade and investment opportunities, with the goal of improving Hungary’s economic competitiveness. The government’s efforts to spur innovation in the Hungarian automotive industry are part of this, due to the sector’s dependence on German manufacturers and the fact that they have a growing interest in electric vehicles.
Despite the differences between the Polish and Hungarian approaches to the European Green Deal, the climate issue is unlikely to disrupt Fidesz’s illiberal alliance with Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party. After all, Hungary’s greater openness towards the European Green Deal is more instrumental than ideological – and both parties continue to emphasise national sovereignty in climate and energy policymaking. Nonetheless, the situation shows that, despite all the other problems in the EU’s relationship with Hungary and Poland, it is still possible for the bloc to engage with nationalist populists in a productive manner. In this, the EU should be careful not to let Poland or Hungary use the climate issue to gain concessions on their violations of democratic norms and standards – particularly given that there is broad popular support for ambitious climate action and the rule of law in both countries.
The geopolitics of the European Green Deal
As laid out in a recent publication by ECFR and Bruegel, the European Green Deal has profound geopolitical consequences. It will change the nature of the EU’s relationships with countries in its neighbourhood and other global players. The deal’s detractors may attempt to frame it as an instrument to achieve autarky and abandon the competitive dynamics of the fossil-fuel age, but this argument ignores energy’s enduring geopolitical features.
ECFR’s survey suggests that policymakers increasingly understand this fact. Twenty-five member states feel that that the European Green Deal was recognised in some way in their country’s foreign policy strategy, the two exceptions being the Czech Republic and Luxembourg. Almost all ECFR’s researchers identified a leader on climate diplomacy in their national systems. These figures included climate ambassadors in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, and the Netherlands; climate envoys in Ireland and Portugal; a task force for climate and security in the Czech Republic; the head of information, policy planning, and strategy at the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the foreign minister in Croatia; and the Ministry of the Energy and Environment in Greece.
States such as France, Germany, and the Nordic countries already have a high profile on climate internationally. And Spain and Italy are aiming to raise their profile on climate in a foreign policy context. However, ECFR’s survey also identifies several other countries that, for different reasons, seem to be interested in putting climate on the foreign policy agenda: Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Portugal. Together with countries that already have a high profile on climate, these member states should form a coalition of the willing to promote measures to address the climate challenge, such as the European Green Deal, as foreign policy issues. This would create a group comprising more than half of EU member states – one that includes small, medium-sized, and larger countries from all regions of the union.
However, understanding that there is a foreign policy challenge does not equate to feeling prepared to tackle it. And member states’ views of the European Green Deal appear to correlate with the extent to which they think about climate as a geopolitical issue – whether they are in defensive mode, focused on managing the agreement’s impact, or are already exploring the geopolitical opportunities it creates.
As ECFR’s survey shows, member states perceive the most significant risks of implementing the European Green Deal as being higher prices for energy and fuel, and the prospect of strategically important industries being overtaken by global competitors (concerns expressed by 15 and 12 countries respectively). These attitudes correlate with the extent to which member states are already building up their renewables sector. For example, countries whose renewable industries are relatively underdeveloped are more likely to be concerned about the risk to strategically important industries. This trend is even starker when one looks at member states that worry about the European Green Deal creating new energy dependencies (the fifth-biggest concern). Seven of the eight countries that identify this risk as being important – the Czech Republic, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Romania, and Luxembourg – have relatively underdeveloped renewables sectors. The only exception is Finland.
However, while preparedness to compete geopolitically appears to shape member states’ perspectives on the European Green Deal, they have not necessarily drawn logical conclusions from this in terms of their relationships with third countries. Eighty-eight per cent of respondents to ECFR’s study stated that the United States was one of the most important actors in efforts to implement the Paris climate goals – a far larger share than that for any other country. This is unsurprising given that the survey took place in late January 2021, a time when Joe Biden’s recent inauguration as US president had raised Europeans’ expectations about American global engagement in general, and on the Paris agreement in particular. However, other findings of the survey are more unsettling as an indicator of the EU’s geopolitical preparedness on climate issues: 68 per cent, 40 per cent, and 16 per cent of respondents placed China, Russia, and Turkey in this category respectively.
As a recent ECFR paper set out, the EU should regard China as a competitor on climate action. Clearly, a constructive climate relationship with China is strategically essential – not only because the country is responsible for one-third of global greenhouse-gas emissions, but also because insufficient action from it would likely encourage similar behaviour from India, Brazil, and other actors. While the EU should seek to compete more effectively with China (by investing in green technologies and shaping international standards), member states appear to be paying disproportionate attention to the country on climate issues – at the expense of relationships closer to home, which could have a real impact.
The pandemic-induced shocks to supply chains Europeans experienced in 2020 suggest that they may need to think more geographically – in terms of connectivity with states in Europe’s neighbourhood – to manage the transition away from carbon. Initially, they might look to develop a buddy system to build up clean energy resources within the EU, with member states that are more advanced partnering with those that are less so. This could take the form of clusters of excellence formed of pairs or groups of member states, and involving both governments and the private sector.
Meanwhile, companies in Turkey, Eastern Partnership countries, North Africa, and Russia are clamouring to understand how to adapt to the European Green Deal so that they maintain access to EU markets. Europeans should seek to influence this discussion with their neighbours, by showing they are serious about the agreement and working to help these partners adapt to its terms. Accordingly, Europeans should shift away from their current focus on carbon-intensive energy, as implied by the attention they currently pay to the Nord Stream 2 project and energy issues in the eastern Mediterranean.
The CBAM will be important in this – given that, as discussed, it is a major point of contention between member states, and is perhaps the most geopolitically significant measure in the European Green Deal. The mechanism will create challenges in the EU’s relationships with its trading partners, which range from those that may put in place retaliatory measures to developing states that could be tempted to look beyond European markets in response. Nonetheless, having announced its intention to implement the CBAM, the EU will lose credibility as a climate leader if it backs down when the going gets tough.
All this points towards the importance of building a strong foreign policy strategy around the European Green Deal and engaging in a climate dialogue with the EU’s trade partners, particularly those in the developing world. This approach could ensure that the deal’s mechanisms achieve their objectives without compromising the EU’s ambition to champion free trade within an international rules-based system – which enables all economies to thrive. ECFR’s survey shows that, in many member states, this strategic approach will require greater dialogue between ministries of foreign affairs, economy, trade, and energy. And it will require the EU to invest its diplomatic resource in ways that underpin the ambitions of the European Green Deal.
How to harness public support for change
Far from giving Europeans a new focus, the covid-19 pandemic has underscored the need for European leadership on the most fundamental crisis – the climate challenge. A pan-European public opinion poll ECFR commissioned in April 2020 showed that, in every one of the ten surveyed countries, the pandemic increased public support for the fulfilment of commitments on climate action.
The policy community’s work on climate issues reflects an awareness of the need to respond to this public mood, but a hesitancy about how best to harness it. There is a clear difference between the high-level rhetoric around the need for climate action and citizens accepting measures that would have a negative impact on their lives. In a survey of 11 EU member states carried out in November 2020, ECFR asked a more specific question about the types of measure that would have public support. The results of the survey underlined the extent to which scientific expertise has now made the case for climate action, and that the choices required by the legislative package to implement the European Green Deal are intensely political.
In every surveyed country except for France and the Netherlands, a plurality of respondents said that the EU should enable greater investment in public transport systems. The share that said they held this view ranged from 43 per cent in Denmark to 44 per cent in Germany, 57 per cent in Portugal, and 58 per cent in Spain. In France and the Netherlands, a plurality supported the CBAM, presumably reflecting a concern that European businesses need to remain competitive as they make the costly changes to their production processes required to move away from carbon dependency.
Strikingly, the European average of support for the CBAM was relatively high – 40 per cent, the same share as that for investment in core industries such as steel. There was widespread support for the CBAM even in countries where governments were concerned about the potential implications of the measure, such as Denmark (41 per cent).
In contrast, an average of just 26 per cent of Europeans advocated investment in a network of charging points for electric cars, the lowest level of support among the survey’s options. This may reflect concern that the European Green Deal will exacerbate social inequality. Since electric and hybrid cars are relatively costly, respondents may see support for this private form of green transport as a boon to the rich. Overall, there are no major differences on these issues between supporters of different political groups – aside from those of Green parties, whose enthusiasm for all options is more pronounced (as one would expect).
One of the biggest challenges that ECFR’s survey throws up comes from the fact that the narrative on EU leadership on climate action has not yet hit home in member states. More than half of the respondents in the survey said that there is no debate on the European Green Deal in the national media. For such a high-level priority of Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission, this is disappointing.
But there is an opening for the EU to demonstrate such leadership – to put forward a clear, compelling narrative on the importance of all citizens playing their part to push the measures forward. Respondents to ECFR’s survey in 21 member states said that the EU is an important voice in the public debate on the climate. The exceptions were Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, and Slovakia – where the public perception is that the EU interferes on the issue – along with Hungary, which sees the bloc as irrelevant in this area. Still, national governments seem relatively open to working with the EU on the climate challenge, with only those in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Poland believing that the EU is interfering rather than providing an important voice on the issue. In contrast, representatives of the private sector in eight member states appear to view the EU as interfering. These countries include France, Germany, and Austria, where the public and government attitudes towards the EU are more positive. Finally, media coverage of climate action in certain countries often portrays the EU as irrelevant (France and Denmark) or as interfering (Bulgaria and Romania).
Overall, while EU institutions may not have shown real leadership in the pandemic, it seems that there is still space for them to do so on the climate challenge. In this way, they can prove the value of European cooperation – both to national leaders, in sharing the burden, and to EU citizens, in driving the necessary changes through. ECFR’s survey suggests that the EU has not yet grasped the opportunity presented by voters’ understanding of the need for European-level action on climate – which could demonstrate the bloc’s capacity to have a tangible impact on policies that affect their lives. But the EU still has a chance to change this, by pushing member states to implement the European Green Deal. ECFR’s research indicates that EU leadership should have a visible focus on climate projects that fall under the bloc’s recovery plan and tackle social inequalities, which member states generally perceive as the most significant challenge in implementing the European Green Deal.
Conclusion
Persuading the EU to sign up to a headline target on climate action – though not simple – was always going to be the easy part. The domestic challenges in implementing the European Green Deal are much more daunting, as they have implications for all EU economies and societies. This is doubly difficult at such a sensitive time, with Europe struggling to recover from the covid-19 crisis. Meeting EU obligations on any issue will be a hard sell in many member states, where the EU’s role in vaccine regulation and procurement has received bad press.
This paper has shown that, while the EU will not be split down the middle over the European Green Deal, the differences in member states’ perspectives could cause the agreement to fizzle out unless they push one another to implement its constituent parts. Today’s EU is not made up of climate leaders and slackers but rather states that have made different levels of progress on renewables and on energy efficiency; states that have taken steps to develop alternatives to carbon-based fuels and those that have not; and states that have varying levels of development in their thinking on the geopolitical dimension of the European Green Deal. All member states have a role to play in the EU’s implementation of the agreement. If they fail to do so, each of them will simply persist with its own interpretation of what climate action should look like.
Therefore, the European Council should adapt the model of Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) on security to address the climate challenge. This Permanent Structured Climate Cooperation (PESCLICO) would enable member states to opt into the areas where they can share best practice with one another, or where they feel a need to make progress domestically. The EU already has plenty of mechanisms to promote green innovation in research and development. The bloc’s Innovation Fund uses revenues from the Emissions Trading System to finance projects aimed at decarbonising Europe. And initiatives such as the European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s Climate Knowledge and Innovation Community connect innovators across the EU with partner countries. While these and other instruments are making critical contributions in their fields, they are yet to receive the political support and engagement from member states that they need to truly spark the spirit of innovation in the wider community.
Admittedly, PESCO has suffered from teething problems. But on climate, with member states having agreed on the headline target for action, such a format could give their collaborative efforts a much-needed boost in regulatory and technological innovation, creating clusters of cooperation across the union and with selected partner countries. For example, France could join with Italy and Spain to assume a leadership role in solar photovoltaic innovation and extend an invitation to Morocco and Tunisia to become “green partners” of the EU in the field. The Rail Baltica project to link Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland could be upgraded to a European knowledge hub for green transport and infrastructure. Hydrogen, carbon capture, and green computing are just a few of the other areas ripe for greater European cooperation.
These partnerships should also build up and empower local stakeholders such as renewable energy cooperatives rather than the entrenched interests of heavy industry and other carbon-intensive sectors. This would rebalance the public debate in communities and member states, and at the EU level, in favour of the green transition.
The EU should urgently develop a coherent foreign policy strategy for the European Green Deal. As many member states are preoccupied with the CBAM part of the deal, the EU is heading towards a big obstacle with this proposal in particular. Domestic lobbies’ scepticism about the measure is prompting some member states to speak out strongly against it in the European Council, arguing that it would be perceived as protectionism and at odds with the EU’s ambitions to be a global champion of free trade. (These are states with small economies that, due to their heavy dependence on exports, worry about third countries’ retaliation against the CBAM.)
There are fears in EU institutions and member states that they cannot muster the collective courage to impose the CBAM on the US; on India because of their dependence on the country for the production of vaccines; or on other developing nations in case this pushes them out of European markets. As a result, they believe the CBAM will have too little global coverage to be effective.
With such a lack of EU resolve, it will be challenging to drive the CBAM through in external relations. But there is a real climate sovereignty issue here that requires the EU to find the necessary courage. The European Commission is publicly committed to bringing forward a proposal on the CBAM in spring 2021. Companies in the US, Russia, Turkey, and elsewhere are taking the prospect seriously and are reaching out to strategy consultants to understand how they can manage this development. If the EU simply steps back from the measure before implementing it, this will make the European Green Deal seem empty of true ambition. At home, it would become difficult to convince European companies that they were safe to engage in the green transition while others played by different rules on carbon dependency. Globally, the EU would have no real leverage in trying to persuade other countries to make the transition. Given that the EU accounts for less than 10 per cent of all greenhouse-gas emissions, this would cause significant damage to not just the bloc’s climate sovereignty but also international efforts to address the climate challenge.
To generate the political resolve to manage the geopolitical dimension of the European Green Deal, the EU should build an alliance of champions of foreign policy strategy into PESCLICO. This coalition of the willing should engage in a focused dialogue between ministries of foreign affairs, economy, and environment. The coalition should create a strategy for maximising EU influence to accelerate climate action globally. This may well mean a shift of focus away from powers over which the EU has relatively little influence, such as China, and towards those in the bloc’s neighbourhood to the south and the east, as well as actors with which it has a strong trading relationship.
Of course, any mechanism that the EU develops must meet WTO requirements. But, in addition, Europe’s free trade champions will need to understand how CBAM fits into a long-term strategy for creating a level playing field, rather than remaining preoccupied with short-term retaliatory measures in the transition period. In the meantime, the EU should continue to build up its ability to respond to economic coercion, which would reassure member states that it is actively managing the CBAM – and not just passively accepting the consequences of moving fastest in the transition to net zero.
Finally, the bloc needs to mitigate the socio-economic challenges of implementing the European Green Deal if the effort is to succeed in the national and EU contexts, and if it is to position Europe as a green leader globally. The EU has already put in place important tools and funding to this end. But, to really succeed in such a groundbreaking endeavour, it will also be critical to create the right narrative. If the EU and its member states focus too narrowly on protecting existing jobs in carbon-intensive industries or compensating people who have lost these jobs, they risk failing to address how energy and climate policy intersect with inequalities of gender, race, class, ethnicity, disability, and age (particularly given that the pandemic-induced economic crisis threatens to erase much of the progress Europe has recently achieved in these areas). Such a narrow focus could also lead to a backlash if citizens have a very limited way of looking at what has been lost and what has been gained – which could play into the hand of populists.
The EU and its member states need to broaden the narrative around the green transition, aiming to communicate that it could have many benefits for quality of life and the economy in individual regions and countries without replicating old inequalities. They should use this deep structural shift to promote a people-centred narrative focusing on empowerment – the opportunities that the European Green Deal provides – and issues that matter to ordinary people, such as air pollution and other health hazards. Since countries across the world are grappling with the socio-economic dimension of the green transition, the EU’s leadership by example here could have high value as an international model.
The climate agenda may be challenging, but the EU needs to deliver on it. The bloc has nailed its colours to the mast in publishing the European Green Deal. And, given the level of expectation around its actions on the climate challenge, the EU would damage public faith in both European cooperation and political leaders’ commitments to the green transition if it abandoned its ambitions. The consequences of such a failure, in the form of a deepening rift between the people and the political system in Europe, could be severe.
Sources for infographics: European Environment Agency (2018), Eurostat (2019), ParlGov (2020)
Acknowledgments
This report would not have been possible without the careful and insightful work in each of the EU’s capitals of ECFR’s associate researchers: Adam Balcer, Vladimir Bartovic, Karlis Bukovskis, Robin-Ivan Capar, Léonard Colomba-Petteng, Simon Desplanque, Björn Fägersten, Lívia Franco, Andrew Gilmore, Jule Könneke, Marin Lessenski, Marko Lovec, Radu Magdin, Daniel Mainwaring, Justinas Mickus, Matej Navrátil, Christine Nissen, Ylva Pettersson, Astrid Portero, Mathilda Salo, Sofia Maria Satanakis, Hüseyin Silman, Cassiopée Thuin, George Tzogopoulos, Niels van Willigen, Viljar Veebel, and Zsuzsanna Végh, as well as Teresa Coratella and Lorena Stella Martini.
The authors are also grateful to members of ECFR’s Council and broader network who gave feedback as part of our climate advisory group, including Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, Mats Engstrom, Anita Orban, Mauricio Petriccione, Julian Popov, and María Sicilia de Bruyelle.
We are hugely indebted to ECFR colleagues including Claire Busse and Gosia Piaskowska, who carried out painstaking work on the data that underpin this report; Piotr Buras, Mariya Trifonova, and Pawel Zerka, who commented on the survey and drafts of the text; and Chris Eichberger and Marlene Riedel for their work on the visualisations and graphics that accompany this report. As ever it was a pleasure and a privilege to work with Chris Raggett, whose editorial work greatly improved the paper.
We would also like to thank Paul Hilder and his team at Datapraxis for their patient collaboration with us in developing and analysing the polling referred to in the report, and to YouGov for conducting the fieldwork.
We are very grateful to Teresa Spancken, Charlotte Ruhbaum, and Stiftung Mercator for their enduring support for ECFR and the Rethink: Europe initiative. This paper was also supported by the European Climate Foundation.
Despite these many and varied contributions, any mistakes remain the authors’ own.
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