Europe’s climate chief has urged politicians against trying to use the climate crisis as a wedge issue in the forthcoming EU parliament elections, calling instead for climate policy that will bring wider economic benefits.
Wopke Hoekstra, who is the EU commissioner for climate action, said that Europe had no choice but to press ahead with strong measures to cut greenhouse gases, whoever was in power, but added that more attention was needed to help businesses thrive in a low-carbon world.
“There is no alternative than to continue with climate action. We need to continue in the direction of travel we have set, he was quoted as saying. “We need to speed up our pace,”.
Rightwing parties are forecast in polls to do well in the election, to be held from 6 to 9 June, largely at the expense of the Greens and socialist parties. Protests by farmers in EU capitals have attacked climate policies, and some rightwing parties have stepped up anti-green rhetoric.
Reacting, Hoekstra maintained that policies to tackle the climate crisis must be a key focus, and were needed for Europe to thrive economically. “That is what the next commission should be all about: continued climate action, mitigation [of greenhouse gases], but I think also, more than in the past, about adaptation [to extreme weather] and a just transition [to a low-carbon economy].”
Read also: Report: Venezuela loses its last glacier as it shrinks down to an ice field
Among other things, he cited recent extreme weather events, including floods in eastern Europe and Germany, as examples of the human and economic tolls the climate crisis was already taking, which must be tackled, and said that Europe also needed to forge ahead in the global economic race to create low-carbon technology. “To those who might have reservations on climate action, how needed it is, [I say] it is not only a matter of nature, it also a matter of geopolitics and, in the end, finance.”
Hoekstra said that he did not see the backlash against climate action in Europe that some on the right have tried to claim. “Eighty per cent of EU citizens articulate that they have significant worries about what is happening to our climate,” he said.
He however denied that Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, was turning away from climate action, as some critics have claimed. “I would say it’s rather the contrary. I don’t know a single example in the domain of climate where we have watered anything down.”
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
