Talking Europe hosts Pascal Canfin, the chair of the environment committee at the European Parliament. He is a former French government minister and a former director of the French branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). We take a look at what is coming out of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, and at the state of the EU’s green transition. Canfin maintains that 80 percent of the laws planned under the EU’s Green Deal should be finished by the end of the current legislative term – something he calls “massive and unprecedented”.
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Asked about COP28 host Dubai saying that fossil fuels should be part of climate solutions, Canfin replied: “We need to have these debates precisely in Dubai and in the Gulf. I know that a lot of NGOs or academics were calling for a boycott of the COP. I think that would have been a mistake. It’s good that this debate is happening in Dubai, and not only in Paris or in other countries that don’t produce oil.”
Pressed on whether Sultan al-Jaber, the president of COP28, sent the wrong signal with his remarks, Canfin said: “The IPCC says that fossil fuel use has to decrease. But nobody is saying that we should stop it overnight. We should also keep in mind the difference between ‘abated’ and ‘unabated’ fossil fuels. Meaning that, when you burn oil, you can keep the CO2 that is emitted and store that CO2 underground. This is a technology that can be used to decrease emissions. But of the course this is a small part of the solution. The largest part of the solution is just to move away from fossil fuels to something else.”
But is the EU in a position to provide an example at the COP? Is it on track to meet its own commitments? “We are now right in the middle of the transition,” Canfin answered. “A few years ago, before the Green Deal, we were clearly not on track, for sure. Now, we can win this battle, or we can lose it. So we need to keep speeding up. We have adopted more than half of the Green Deal and we are negotiating the last part of the second half. We will probably close more than 80 percent of the total legislation that we need, in this [legislative] term. With the goal of decreasing our CO2 emissions by 55 percent by 2030. This is massive. It is completely unprecedented.”
Looking ahead to next year’s European elections, we discuss the challenge to centrist parties from movements such as the French far-right National Rally, or the Dutch Freedom Party, which just won the parliamentary election in the Netherlands.
“We are working very hard at the European level precisely to have harmonised rules for the first time. We are close, very close, to finding a deal that would allow us to have better treatment of asylum seekers from a human perspective and also to make sure that we control our borders. If we manage to get this right, it will interesting to watch the extreme right in the election campaign. [Italian Prime Minister] Giorgia Meloni started off being against this kind of [migration and asylum] pact but now, in the European Parliament, all the MEPs coming from the Lega and the three parties that are in the Italian government, are voting in favour of this pact. So once you have the responsibility of government, you see that the European solution is the only possible way forward. We will advocate this European solution very strongly in the campaign.”
Programme produced by Sophie Samaille, Juliette Laurain, Perrine Desplats and Isabelle Romero