So they did it: by 2040, the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions should be no more than a tenth of what they were in 1990. Or to put it another way, less than a sixth of what they are right now.
It’s easy to grow complacent – cynical, even – about climate action at the political level.
Anyone who was at the COP29 climate conference in Baku last year – as I was – will have sensed the futility of governments wrangling over what seem like pennies, given what’s at stake. Added to which the US, which had already ramped up oil and gas production to world record levels under the Biden administration, has pulled out of the Paris Agreement.
But without the luxury of oil and gas reserves, Europe is now asking if it can afford to replace gas from the east with gas from the leaky fracking fields of America. The proposed 2040 target implies a more profound choice: one between import dependency and missing the target, or accelerating the green transition.
Seventeen years after Europe’s first emissions reduction target was set in law, the appetite for fossil fuels remains high, thanks to the failure to insulate homes, switch heat pumps for gas boilers, or halt the rise of emissions from road transport.
The scale of investment now needed is beyond any New Deal or Marshall Plan, or the bank bailouts that followed the 2008 financial crisis.
It took a war with real bullets for Europe’s champion of frugality to tear off its self-imposed fiscal straightjacket. Will that logic – coupled with a pooling of European debt, which has only ever happened in the face of a global pandemic – be replicated to reach the 90% target? | 
