After two years of real progress on climate, a European ‘greenlash’ is brewing

When floods swept Europe in July 2021, killing more than 200 people in Germany, Belgium and neighbouring countries, it was a disaster that came as the climate crisis was moving to the top of Europe’s political agenda. All of a sudden, climate was no longer an abstract threat that could be batted into a distant future; it was already here, causing shocking weather events, destroying lives and leaving people homeless.

In northern Europe especially, spurred by the Fridays for Future school strikes, the climate crisis had already spilled into politics, pushing policy into action. But in 2021, measurable progress towards the goal of net zero emissions by 2050 began to be made. The EU didn’t just limit itself to ambitious targets, enshrined in laws and regulations. It also put its money where its mouth was.

Neither the pandemic nor Russia’s subsequent invasion of Ukraine distracted its focus. On the contrary, Europe used these crises to put flesh on the bones of a green deal, accelerating its race to net zero. As a result of the pandemic, the EU agreed to channel 37% of its economic recovery funds to the energy transition, while in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the energy crisis it unleashed, European countries stepped up their investments in renewables and energy efficiency as they strived to wean themselves off Russian gas.

In 2022, renewables overtook gas to become the leading source of electricity generation in the EU, with solar power leaping by a record 24%. Key policies have also been approved, from the extension of carbon pricing to cover the politically sensitive areas of buildings and transport, to the adoption of a carbon border tax to ensure that as EU industry is forced to decarbonise, Europe doesn’t end up importing dirtier and cheaper products from elsewhere. A few weeks ago, a senior official at the European Commission told me that the EU had completed the lion’s share of its green agenda in this legislative cycle, well beyond Brussels’ rosiest expectations a few years ago.

Yet grey (or rather brown) clouds are now massing on the horizon. Across Europe, worrying signs of a green backlash are surfacing, as citizens and businesses start feeling the costs of the energy transition. Dutch farmers are up in arms over stringent limits on nitrogen emissions, arguing that they will make European agriculture financially unviable. The German public is fretting over the phaseout of gas boilers, while the car industry has successfully squeezed in a loophole for synthetic fuels to lengthen the lifespan of conventional combustion engines, which are meant to be phased out across the EU by 2035. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the Belgian prime minister, Alexander De Croo, have both publicly called for a “pause” in the EU’s green legislative agenda, while Poland is fighting for exemptions to sustain its coal subsidies. In the European parliament, conservatives and centre-right MEPs are putting spokes in the wheels of the nature conservation law, the biodiversity part of the EU’s green deal.

There are two opposing interpretations of this “greenlash”. The first is that pressure is mounting against the green agenda because it is now real. As long as climate action was an abstract, lofty goal, it was easy for everyone to pay lip service to it. You could do the right thing and stand up for action on the climate crisis without paying the price for it. Now the hard part – although action is still far too slow and uneven – is actually happening. This change, often referred to as a green “transition”, is revolutionary in its scope, complexity and the speed at which it is meant to be taking place. And revolutions have winners and losers.

It is only natural that the “losers” want to make their voices heard – but it is up to politics to channel that dissent, and to find ways of compensating those opposing voices to ensure that their resistance does not derail the journey to net zero. The reality of decarbonisation will surely differ from the original plan, as the social, economic and political repercussions play out and unforeseen technological breakthroughs take place. In short, the “greenlash” proves that the move to net zero is real, not that Europeans are going into reverse on climate action.

But the second interpretation says the opposite might be true: the pushback against green policies could be the sign of worse to come. As EU countries such as Spain, Slovakia and Poland prepare for elections later this year, and with European parliament elections in 2024, there is a real risk that rightwing, populist parties will latch on to the “greenlash” and surge back in the polls. While no longer openly climate crisis deniers, they denounce the inequalities and the harm caused to industry they say are exacerbated by climate policies.

They call for an “ecological sovereignty”, which, rather than pressing for decarbonisation, insists on the preservation of landscapes from the supposed visual horrors of wind and solar farms, and on the preservation of traditional food and agriculture from the purported abomination of synthetic meats and alternative sources of proteins, such as insects.