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EU exploring weaker 2040 climate goal [1]

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Date: 2025-03-31 02:38:58+00:00

The options being discussed range from allowing countries to defer steeper cuts to letting them count carbon reductions they pay for in other countries. Another idea would be to lean more on carbon that forests or technology can remove from the air.

For EU officials, the approach is a way to make an increasingly unpopular goal more politically palatable — and help ensure the European Parliament and EU capitals will approve the legislation.

But civil society groups warn the measures could also weaken the EU’s overall efforts to stamp out planet-warming emissions.

The options being discussed range from allowing countries to defer steeper cuts to letting them count carbon reductions they pay for in other countries. | Nikolay Doychinov/AFP via Getty Images

These are “very dangerous proposals,” said Sam Van den plas, policy director at the Carbon Market Watch NGO. “All those things are potential distractions from the need to deliver immediate emission reductions. The flexibility can also be seen as loopholes.”

Show me some options

The Commission is looking at four options to give countries more leeway.

To start, officials are contemplating a “nonlinear” path between the EU’s 2030 emissions-cutting target of 55 percent and its 2040 goal — rather than a straight line. That could mean slower emission cuts to start, compensated by rapid declines later in the 2030s. It would also mean more pollution in total over the decade.

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[1] Url: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-exploring-weaker-2040-climate-goal-90-greenhouse-gas-cut-wopke-hoekstra/#:~:text=The%20European%20Commission%2C%20the%20EU's,greenhouse%20gas%20pollution%20by%202040.

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