The EU got its first climate report card. It’s not good

Now’s not the time for Green Deal fatigue. In fact, Europe must accelerate its efforts.

That’s the blunt conclusion in a major, first-of-its-kind assessment from the EU’s top climate science advisory body on how Europe is doing in its goal to reach climate neutrality by 2050.

While politicians across the bloc have called for a pause in green lawmaking, citing economic woes and worried voters, the climate scientists say Brussels and EU capitals actually need to do more, not less.

A leaked draft of the 2024 EU election manifesto for the European People’s Party — the center-right bloc that has the largest cohort in the European Parliament — promised a shift away from regulation in pursuit of green goals and an outright ban on bans, including a promise to reverse the EU’s plans to end production of combustion engines.

Across more than 350 pages, the EU’s Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change — a 15-member panel of top climate experts charged with providing advice on EU policy — laid out a host of recommendations for course corrections across every sector of the economy and urged new engagement from policymakers.

The message was stark, highlighting the need for new efforts, even where the political cost of action will be high. Particular concerns were raised over inadequate efforts to stop pollution from the agricultural sector — even as German farmers are in revolt over a cut to their diesel subsidy.

The pace at which greenhouse gas emissions are being reduced must double, starting immediately, if the EU is to hit its 2030 goal to cut emissions 55 percent below 1990 levels. That acceleration has begun, but current national plans are only enough to reach a 49-51 percent cut. The situation looks even bleaker for reaching the EU’s legally mandated goal of net zero by 2050, with the bloc currently missing that target by a wide margin.

Here are seven key messages from the advisory board’s report.

National governments must do more — or Brussels should step in

Over the past four years, Brussels has set in law a host of climate regulations. Capitals now have to integrate those into domestic legislation and make the necessary changes within their country.

“Here is where a lot of homework has to be done,” the chair of the advisory board, Ottmar Edenhofer, told reporters during a briefing call this week.

That’s a matter of urgency, the board says, given that these new measures are meant to reduce emissions this decade.

But EU countries don’t have the greatest track record when it comes to meeting deadlines. Many countries missed last year’s deadline for submitting drafts of their next climate plan, for example, the report notes.

The board says that if governments don’t deliver sufficiently ambitious plans by the final deadline in June this year, it’s time for the Commission to crack down — including, if necessary, by initiating legal procedures that could result in court cases and fines.

The European Commission’s got its work cut out

This EU executive may have delivered dozens of bills and initiatives to build the foundations of the European Green Deal over the last five years, but it hasn’t managed to get everything done.

The next Commission will need to make urgent progress on revising the EU’s energy taxation rules, the advisory board warns, including raising minimum tax rates for fossil fuels and slashing tax exemptions for sectors like aviation. The revamp, proposed by the current Commission in 2021, has been gathering dust.

Another promise this Commission barely delivered on is its “Farm to Fork” strategy for making Europe’s food system more sustainable. The Commission published the strategy in 2020, but translated few of its key ambitions into legislative proposals, the report notes.

Beyond those pending initiatives, the next Commission should start work on a slew of laws to get the EU on track for climate neutrality by mid-century, the board says — from expanding its carbon pricing regime even further to accelerating the phaseout of fossil fuels.

Agriculture needs reining in — is a meat tax coming?

Agricultural emissions have remained largely unchanged for the past 20 years and the EU isn’t taking steps in the right direction, the report says. It’s the area where the lack of progress is “most notable,” Edenhofer said.

Farming subsidies still reward emission-intensive agricultural practices such as livestock production and aren’t linked to any emission reduction targets. At the same time, Brussels has indefinitely put off key proposals to address sustainable food consumption and encourage healthier, more plant-based diets.

The report warns the EU must slash production and consumption of products such as meat, dairy and eggs if it wants to get close to the board’s recommended targets for 2040.

Pricing emissions is one of the ways to do so, according to the board’s report, which suggests the EU should “start preparations now with a view to introducing pricing instruments” in the food and agriculture sector.

Politically, this has faced strong opposition from industry lobbies and lawmakers. “We are not naive to think that such a scheme is easy to implement,” Edenhofer said.

Climate blowback is a worrying new trend

There’s no avoiding the fact that policies aimed at rebuilding the economy will create upheaval and, in some cases, the burden lands unfairly on low-income earners, the scientists said. For example, the EU’s new carbon price on heating fuels will take up a bigger share of household income in poor homes.

Across the EU, voters are worried about the cost of these policies piling up on top of inflation pressures. And the far right is appealing to those concerns by attacking green measures.

“Some climate policies are disruptive and regressive. And it is a huge challenge,” said Edenhofer. “The high-income households have to bear a higher burden.”

The report notes that the EU has tried to provide some compensation to the most affected, in particular through its Social Climate Fund. But it raises concerns that the fund may not have enough money.

Nuclear ‘not as important’ as other tech

The scientists devoted 20 pages of the report to discussions of various “levers” the EU can use to stamp carbon pollution out of the energy sector. Notable for its absence from this list was nuclear power.

In an aside, the scientists explained this exclusion. Nuclear “has been generally decreasing since 2006,” it says. And given the “long lead times” for nuclear projects, they conclude that the power source couldn’t play any part in spurring the EU toward its near-term climate goals. Further uncertainty has been created by the industry’s vulnerability to droughts, which have caused plants to shutter during summer months.

Channeling EU climate money into nuclear energy has been a rolling battle between the nuclear-friendly French government and the deeply skeptical Germans. The advisory board chair Edenhofer — himself a German — said that when it came to nuclear: “Basically we are agnostic.”

Some of the board’s scenarios foresee a large increase in nuclear energy, he said. But “we see that building new reactors in the EU is not picking up, it is so far very expensive and taking much more time than anticipated.”

He added: "We have focused on issues like carbon dioxide removal, like carbon capture and storage, like the expansion of renewables, which from our point of view, are much more important."

Smaller houses, smaller cars — Europeans should consume less

Meat consumption is just one area where the advisory board thinks Brussels should intervene to encourage Europeans to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle.

“EU policies should incentivize more vigorously the reduction of energy and material demand,” the report’s authors write.

That includes some measures that most Europeans wouldn’t notice, such as making use of existing buildings rather than constructing from scratch. But other policies would intervene directly in people’s lives.

The report suggests governments could change taxation to encourage people to move into smaller apartments — requiring less energy to heat — once their children move out, or incentivize the purchase of smaller, more efficient electric cars over zero-emission SUVs.

Europe needs to kick its gas addiction

To meet climate targets, the EU needs to “almost fully phase out the use of coal and fossil gas in public electricity and heat generation” by 2040, the advisory board says, criticizing the bloc for its reluctance to tackle gas in particular.

“The EU’s stance on the role of fossil gas is ambiguous, leading to costly infrastructural and institutional lock-ins, and delayed fossil fuel phase-out,” the authors write.

One key reason: The EU and its member countries keep throwing money at gas in the form of fossil fuel subsidies, which surged in the wake of the 2022 energy crisis. “Some might argue this is only a temporary phenomenon,” Edenhofer said. “But we don’t see a clear phaseout plan in most member states.”

But slashing subsidies is a delicate matter: Planned diesel subsidy cuts — for budgetary, rather than climate policy reasons — sparked nationwide protests by German farmers this month.

Mari Eccles contributed to this article.

This article has been updated.