EU to unveil climate change policy blueprint
The European Union will today “unveil its most ambitious plan yet to tackle climate change, aiming to pull ahead in the race among the world’s biggest economies to turn far-off green goals into concrete action this decade”, reports Reuters. It continues: “The European Commission, which drafts EU policies, will set out in painstaking detail how the bloc’s 27 countries can meet their collective goal to net reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% from 1990 levels by 2030.”
The “Fit for 55” package has dubbed the EU’s “man-on-the-moon moment” by commission president Ursula von der Leyen, says the Financial Times, but “risks a backlash from poorer EU countries and some industries which argue that the pace of change and increased regulations will become a financial burden”.
The FT continues: “The centrepiece of the EU’s master plan is to expand the emissions trading scheme, a system that makes companies pay for the cost of polluting. Brussels wants to go further to include emissions from the car industry and from heating buildings to quicken the pace of decarbonisation.” Frans Timmermans, the commission’s executive vice-president in charge of green policy, called the package “arguably the biggest transformational operation in living memory”, the paper notes. Reuters has a “factbox” piece looking at what the plan includes.
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