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LYON, France — The European Greens doubled down on their climate ambitions in the party’s election manifesto adopted on Sunday.
The European Union should step up its efforts to fight climate change, “go beyond” a 55 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and “achieve full climate neutrality by 2040,” the party said in its EU election manifesto.
That’s a decade earlier than currently agreed at the EU level, with the Green Deal calling for reaching climate neutrality by 2050.
The earlier target represents a loss for the German Greens who, ahead of a three-day party congress in Lyon this weekend, had pushed for the climate neutrality target to be delayed to 2045, according to amendments seen by POLITICO.
The election manifesto, which was adopted by a large majority of national delegations, warned that meeting these climate objectives “must not rely on false solutions such as geo-engineering.”
The Greens are at risk of losing about a third of their seats in the European Parliament at the EU election in June, while a backlash against Brussels’ green agenda has been sweeping across the Continent in recent weeks. The party’s response has been to redouble the push on its core demands for higher climate ambition.
The final manifesto, for example, calls for the EU energy system to rely on 100 percent renewable sources and to phase out all fossil fuels by 2040, “starting with coal by 2030.” It also calls on the EU to adopt a plan for phasing out “fossil gas and oil as early as 2035 and no later than 2040.”
That point is another loss for the German Greens, who had pushed for deleting phaseout dates for fossil gas and oil from the manifesto.
The Greens have also been fighting back against the conservatives’ and far right’s attacks blaming them for farmers’ current struggles and for forcing the green transition to quickly on the sector.
Over the weekend, the Greens amended their manifesto to respond to farmers’ discontent, saying they will campaign for “a new agricultural model that reduces emissions, protect the environment, and foster social justice.”
The text insists that “farmers should make a decent income of their work,” and that the Greens will push to “make sure farmers are not exposed to unfair competition from products not respecting the same standards, including those imported from third countries” — which have been key demands of farmers’ unions during the recent demonstrations.
