EU negotiators clinch Climate Law deal

EU policymakers struck an agreement early Wednesday on the Climate Law after hours of difficult negotiations that stretched through the night — making the EU the first of the world’s three top polluters to put its 2050 climate neutrality goal into law.

“We are very happy with the provisional deal reached today,” Portugal’s Climate Minister João Pedro Matos Fernandes told POLITICO in a statement, calling the bill “the law of laws” for EU climate legislation for the next 30 years.

The deal comes after months of protracted talks between the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council, with negotiators split over how far to go in requiring countries to cut emissions over the next decade and beyond.

Under the deal, negotiators agreed to raise the EU’s 2030 emissions reduction goal to a net 55 percent cut, up from the current 40 percent target. That’s in line with the level EU leaders endorsed in December, but far off the Parliament negotiating team’s original demand of a 60 percent cut. The deal also maintained the bloc’s 2050 climate neutrality goal at EU level rather than requiring each country to apply that deadline at home, as called for by Parliament.

The agreement lands just a day ahead of a U.S.-led virtual climate summit where EU leaders were keen to show off the bloc’s climate leadership. The agreement will send “a strong signal to the world” ahead of the summit, “and pave the way for the Commission to propose its ‘fit-for-55’ climate package in June,” Matos Fernandes said.

But it’s a disappointment for the European Parliament, which had hoped for greater ambition on the bloc’s climate targets.

To mollify MEPs’ concerns that counting forests and CO2 removals toward the bloc’s 2030 goal would weaken incentives to cut emissions, the deal promises to promote the growth of forest sinks that would absorb more CO2 in the coming years, officials said.

But it’s little consolation to the Parliament’s chief negotiator, Swedish Socialist MEP Jytte Guteland, who had held out for more for weeks, as well the Greens and Renew Europe negotiators. “We fought hard but achieved little,” Greens MEP Michael Bloss tweeted. European People’s Party negotiator Peter Liese, meanwhile, welcomed the target as “very ambitious.”

The European Parliament has won some other concessions, however. Parties agreed to create an independent advisory council, called the European Scientific Advisory Board, to track the EU’s climate course, and use the concept of a greenhouse gas budget, determining how much the EU can still emit to stay in line with its climate objectives, to inform the EU’s 2040 climate target.

“Budget and science good. The rest of ambitions stopped by Council,” Finnish Renew Europe MEP Nils Torvalds told POLITICO in a text message shortly after the deal was struck.

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