Fifty-five percent. This is the target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that the European Union (EU) has set itself for 2030, compared with their 1990 level, with a view to achieving climate neutrality by 2050. While this increased ambition is sometimes presented as one of the flagships of the European Commission’s Green Deal, it is at the heart of the lawsuit filed in February with the Court of Justice of the European Union by two non-governmental organisations (NGOs) denouncing the methodology used to set this target, which has become the main cornerstone of European energy and climate policies. “The question is above all whether the figures, the objectives, have been adequately decided”says Romain Didi of the European Climate Action Network, an NGO that is carrying out this action together with the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN). The two NGOs submitted their final observations to the EU General Court in August.
The applicants would like to know for sure: is the scientific basis leading to the 55% level sound? The two associations are convinced that the basis of the legislative work initiated in 2020 (the Commission’s impact studies) was too limited. More drastic scenarios for reducing emissions would have been ruled out without justification by officials. “The Commission should have calculated the overall effort to reduce greenhouse gases by 2030, and deducted the fair share that should go to the European Union, considering all possible options, even the most ambitious ones, which was not done.”believes Didi.
The Commission would therefore have excluded the concepts of equity, of “fair” distribution of efforts between rich and poor countries. Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, professor emeritus of climatology at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and former vice-president of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), recalls that, for example, “To limit the increase in temperatures to 1.5 degrees, it is necessary to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 on a global scale. But that is a general average. If the EU wanted to assume its historical responsibility for CO emissions,2higher than that of emerging countries, it should aim for neutrality no later than 2050, which would leave more time for others to achieve this goal.Following this logic, the intermediate step of 55% is insufficient.
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