EU facing backlash over some green policies

BRUSSELS — What a difference five years make. During the last European Union (EU) elections in 2019, hundreds of thousands across the 27-nation bloc staged protests to fight climate change. Ahead of this year’s EU vote, farmers are in the streets demanding fewer green rules, and politicians cannot afford to ignore them.

A shift in political tone around how to protect the planet is looming over EU Parliament elections in June, even as climate change unleashes more severe and costly extreme weather.

“There is a clear backlash on the agriculture part of the Green Deal,” said French EU lawmaker Pascal Canfin.

“But there is no backlash for the rest,” he said.

To appease farmers protesting low food prices and high EU environmental standards, the EU last week loosened environmental regulations on fallow land while France paused a national pesticide reduction policy.

But the overall EU ‘Green Deal’ vision for tackling climate change remains intact, supported by more than two dozen laws passed over the last five years to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

The policies already in place are unlikely to be withdrawn. But the EU’s recent attempts to fold broader environmental policies into this package have faltered. In the last few months, EU countries and lawmakers have shot down or weakened new laws on industrial pollution, cutting pesticide use and restoring damaged nature.

“We shouldn’t mix environment and climate,” said Peter Liese, an EU lawmaker from the center-right European

People’s Party, the biggest political family in the EU parliament.

“If we want to be carbon neutral and still want to be industrialized... we cannot do everything at the same time,” he said. —