The European Commission has unveiled ambitious new climate targets, but they are going to be a hard sell. The plan aims to cut carbon emissions by 90% by 2040, though member states are free to pursue even stricter goals. Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s Executive Vice-President for a Clean, Just and Competitive Transition, admitted this week that pressure is mounting to reduce the blow of such far-reaching measures.

Politico reports that Ribera is under pressure to soften the target with a greater use of credits and offsets — the equivalent of buying medieval indulgences. In addition, Belgium, Estonia and Poland have been chided for not showing the Commission their plans to achieve such reductions. The worst is yet to come, and the Commission is seeking to temper the CBAM, essentially a complex tariff on goods imported into the EU.

Populism today gets blamed for a hostility to climate change mitigation policies, but the consensus was always brittle. The political and administrative class found it easy to set ambitious targets, particularly if they were in the distant future, but ignored the reality that there would be many losers. Removing cheap hydrocarbons and replacing them with intermittent, unreliable and expensive energy causes significant downstream effects, multiplied for industry. Germany, which today bankrolls the European project, embarked on its Energiewende in 2011, a project to increase the share of renewables to 80% by 2050. As predicted, it is now experiencing the longest economic decline since 1990 as Europe deindustrialises.

Further warnings have also been raised. Sir Richard Dearlove, the retired former head of MI6, described the UK’s strategy — even more aggressive than Brussels’s — as a threat to national security, making the UK too reliant on China.

A glimpse of the societal breakdown that would be a likely consequence of a prolonged blackout came in April on the Iberian peninsula. Europe’s interconnected electricity grids must maintain a steady frequency of 50Hz, and only small deviations can be tolerated. Today’s grids accommodate intermittent wind power, but they’ve lost the stabilising force once freely provided by synchronous generators — the spinning mass of large turbines that acted like shock absorbers, helping to maintain frequency when generators unexpectedly dropped offline. Restarting a grid from scratch, an operation known as a black start, has never been attempted in the UK, and can only be modelled.

European climate policy now looks isolated — an outlier globally. China is expected to burn 4.37 billion tonnes of coal this year. India’s coal production has soared after significant investment in new capacity under Modi, rising from 646 million tonnes in 2014 to over one billion tonnes in 2023, importing a further 243 million. India is not now expected to reach “peak coal” until the 2030s. By comparison, the EU’s coal output was 50 million — a quarter of its total usage.

In Washington, Donald Trump has withdrawn from the UN Paris Agreement, and declared a national energy emergency. This is designed to stimulate the production of hydrocarbons, biofuels, nuclear energy, and thermal and hydro power renewables, but not solar and wind, the two areas where the climate finance complex has put most of its chips. Dozens of other policy changes have been announced.

Commissioner Ribera left no one in any doubt that the EU sees moral global leadership — or virtue-signalling — as its priority. “We have this responsibility to keep on being a kind of lighthouse,” she insisted. The EU may be lighting the way, but, unfortunately for the Commission, few are following.

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Andrew Orlowski is a business columnist at The Daily Telegraph and has covered technology competition lawsuits for 25 years.

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