Green Deal Could Limit Dramatic Effects of Climate Change

The world is debating whether the ongoing Amazonian fires are man-made and it’s unlikely that there will be consensus soon. Wildfires are common in Brazil's dry season, but one of this scale and ferocity stresses away from the common path. There have been unprecedented fires in Siberia and the Arctic, we lost a glacier earlier this week to climate change, and half of the Great Barrier Reef is dead. The destruction caused by these events around the world have both economical and far-reaching implications. However, it stresses a critical fact—climate change is here to stay and we need a responsible and consolidated decarbonization strategy, preferable with international intervention, to help protect the world from the more dramatic impacts of climate change.

Something Positive

On a positive note, the European Union has put climate change at the top of its agenda and is in talks to increase its emission reduction target from 40% to 50% by 2030. In July 2019, Ursula von der Leyen, a German politician and the first female president of the European Commission, aims to establish climate change as the priority and has promised to deliver a European Green Deal to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. 

European Green Deal

The Green Deal could help reiterate the fact that climate neutrality by 2050 is both technically and economically possible. Being carbon-neutral classifies the action taken by organizations, businesses, and individuals to remove as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they put into it. The overall goal of carbon neutrality is to achieve a zero-carbon footprint. This is of paramount importance, as scientists have shown that achieving climate neutrality within that timeframe is the only sensible way to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, therefore limiting the impacts of climate change. 

The Green Deal plans to unlock an investment of €1 trillion ($1.1 trillion) in the next decade by turning the European investment bank into a climate bank. Additionally, the Green Deal plans to introduce a carbon border tariff to ensure that companies can compete on equal term without moving to other EU countries to escape carbon costs. 

While there is skepticism that introducing a carbon tariff on products imported to the EU would be difficult to enforce and tax policies would require unanimous agreement among EU member states, there is no denying the fact that the world needs to adopt bold and urgent steps to address this burning issue.