In the land of the blind, the one-eyed rules. And so it goes for the European Union in the
race to net zero. In spite of relative progress, it remains shortsighted in its
understanding of the climate crisis as the fundamental game changer for global security
and for the European project itself.
Days before the start of the COP26 in Glasgow, Patricia Espinosa, the executive
secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change, issued a
very clear warning: lest countries limit global warming to a maximum of 1.5°Celsius, the
world will be faced with global chaos and conflict. Her statement was issued against the
backdrop of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose
modeling projections have shown that a 1.5°C temperature increase compared to pre-
industrial levels will already take the world into uncharted territory, with compound
shocks and disasters.
Since the European Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen came into office in
2019, the EU has managed to pass a climate law, making its transition binding and
effective at the latest in 2050. The Fit for 55 package takes the union beyond the level of
simple pledges into actual planning of the energy transition for the 2030 horizon. The EU
is also working on improving its emission trading system and proposing a carbon border
adjustment mechanism to leverage its common market potential for incentivizing
transitions abroad. In addition, the European Commission is bound to commit at least 30
percent of its multi-annual financial framework to climate measures. This list of
achievements is incomplete, and yet it is exponentially more than most other countries
or geopolitical blocs can demonstrate.
For all of its efforts, though, the EU is still not facing the climate crisis with an adequate
set of analytical frameworks and tools, which is worrying not only for the future of the
planet but also for its own future. The EU has designed its transition on two strategic
legs. One is green, the other is digital. The Green Deal is meant to ensure that the EU
can walk into the next industrial revolution while being clean and climate-friendly. But
one critical lacuna is that it was designed mostly with national and regional priorities in
mind, while leaving the foreign policy aspect to the implementation phase. The problem
is that when the foreign implications of European transitions are taken into account, they
potentially question the very foundations of the Green Deal.
Why? Both the green and the digital priorities require new types of dependencies on
critical materials for which Europe is resource-poor. For decades, China has provided
Europe and the rest of the world with some of these materials. It is endowed with about
80 percent of known resources, such as rare earths, for materials that are essential for
the construction of wind turbines, electric vehicles, drones, microchips, and other
technologies. China knows that this comparative advantage makes it a central actor of
the green transition. Over the last few decades, it has worked on building a vertically
integrated supply and value chain as the core component of its economic growth. This planning capacity has produced wonders for China, taking it to the position of economic
and geo-strategic strength it finds itself in today. Europe has finally woken up to the
strategic implications of its dependency on China. In September 2020, the European
Commission’s Joint Research Center issued a foresight study regarding the critical
materials necessary to the EU’s transitions. It highlighted the inherent risks of being so
dependent on a systemic rival like China, which is known by now for blackmailing
countries voicing concerns over its human rights abuses with disruption of critical supply
chains. This has led the EU to assess how to lessen its dependency on China to run
ahead towards its own transition objectives.
Europe holds some resources but they are not abundant enough to meet the full
demand for green and digital priorities. In addition, environmental activists are keen on
protecting European ecosystems from heavily polluting mining ventures. So European
actors have to look to other horizons to quench their demand. Where should they look?
The deep seas are replete with little nodules that compound together a number of critical
materials. But some marine biodiversity actors have called for a moratorium on all
mining activities in the seas so as to avoid further biodiversity loss and ocean damage.
In terrestrial ecosystems, Europe will have to turn to places such as the Congo Basin,
the Amazon, and the wet forests of Indonesia, Myanmar, and Southern Africa.
Questions about how go about extracting for decarbonization remain open. What is clear
though is that a decoupling of economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions entails
a recoupling with environmental extraction. In other words, the green transition will
necessitate plundering the underground of the vital natural ecosystems that still help
humanity to regulate the global climate regime.
In sum, because climate transition plans have mostly focused on carbon dioxide
emissions, they are pitting the climate against the environment, biodiversity, and
ecological integrity. Laying hands on these ecosystems will not just lead to the release of
more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but also to the release of water as a
greenhouse gas (which magnifies the effects of carbon dioxide) and to disruptions of
atmospheric rivers that naturally distribute water in and between different regions and
continents. In other words, by charging ahead with a transition plan that couples green
and digital, and which opens the door to geopolitical competition over new economic
types of economic growth and access to raw materials, Europe may create more climate
disruptions than it solves and generate water scarcity around the globe.
The fundamental logical lacuna of green and digital transitions points to three critical
issues for the transition and for the European Union. One is that the cooperation
framework around the climate crisis is flawed. The point of collective transitions should
not just be to substitute energy systems to power industrial and economic growth that
overshoot planetary boundaries. The objective should be to rebuild ecological integrity
as the basis for global security and economic systems. Planetary boundaries and a full
spectrum of ecological measures should guide transitions. Discussions about how to
distribute rights to emit carbon dioxide and to pollute are fallacious and dangerous. It is
not only making humanity lose time in the absolute necessity to decarbonize, but also on
the path towards truly regenerative solutions.
Second, the transition must be collective and global. Fragile, conflict-affected, and
climate-vulnerable countries stand at the center of the transition because they are some
of the most resource-endowed for it. Yet, they are dangerously weak in the face of an
international competition that may disregard ecological integrity in the race towards
technological revolutions and climate leadership. If these countries are supported
technically and politically, they may well help to de-escalate geopolitical tensions in the
transition and to regulate how economic competition can be assuaged to meet
ecological priorities. The EU must partner effectively with these countries since its future
depends partially on them.
Finally, the EU remains the most sophisticated peace project in human history. But if it
fails to adopt an institutional and strategic planning capacity that is able to reconcile
short-term and long-term objectives, as well as to understand the hidden costs and
potential shocks of the biggest energy and economic transition in human history, it will
succumb to its own incoherence. The EU’s history is based on weaving economic
interdependencies to generate peace and common interests. Europe’s future will
depend on its ability to reconcile and amplify economic and ecological
interdependencies. While it may not be apparent for now since climate considerations
are still secondary to decision-making, this is actually how Europe could lay a claim to
becoming a truly geopolitical and visionary force.
The article gives the views of the author, not the position of ‘Europe’s Futures
Ideas for Action’ project or the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM).