: After Decades of Offering Climate Carrots, Europe Adds a Stick In Its ‘Fit for 55’ Policy Roadmap #WorldNEWS The European Union unveiled a new policy roadmap Wednesday designed to slash its emissions

After Decades of Offering Climate Carrots, Europe Adds a Stick In Its ‘Fit for 55’ Policy Roadmap #WorldNEWS
The European Union unveiled a new policy roadmap Wednesday designed to slash its emissions 55% over the next decade. The plan calls for a strengthening of the blocs carbon pricing scheme, increasing renewable energy use and establishing a more stringent standard to reduce emissions from cars. In unveiling a detailed package, the EU is putting its money where its mouth is and, leaders hope, sending a message to the rest of the world that the bloc will lead the world into a low-carbon future.
So with that leadership role in mind, it might come as a surprise that one of the key planks in the plan penalizes other countries Europe wants to lead. The measure slaps a tax on imported products with high-carbon content, in effect targeting countries where the governments hasnt acted swiftly enough to reduce emissions. On the surface, it sounds like a bit of arcane wonky policymaking. The measure, known as a border carbon adjustment mechanism, has the wonkiest of names and the EU positioned it as just one small plank in a much bigger package.
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But the measure signals big changes to come. The unveiling of the policy is a testament to how climate change is reshaping the world around us as it seeps into other issues once siloed like global trade. It also signals a new front in the global fight against climate change: after decades of offering carrots to encourage countries to act on climate change, the EU is turning to sticks. And climate policy experts say the EU’s policy is only the beginning.
“There’s a powerful incentive once one significant country has adopted this,” U. S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told me last year before joining the Biden Administration. “This really creates an incentive for other countries to say, ‘Yeah, I want to get inside that club. ’”
To understand the significance of this moment for climate policy, it’s helpful to take a look back at the history of international climate policy. For decades, international climate efforts have centered on a collaborative approach. Countries negotiated voluntary international agreements with the hope that their counterparts would sign up because it’s in everyone’s interest to fight climate change. Following the refusal of the U. S. to join the Kyoto Protocol in the early 2000s, some experts outside the U. S. began calling for a border carbon adjustment. But such efforts went nowhere: globalization and trade were sacrosanct. Former President Donald Trump disrupted that dynamic, tearing up trade norms and climate agreements at the same time. In doing so, he created a lane for policies like this to bubble up elsewhere.