Europe’s biggest ever trade deal finally got the nod Friday after 25 years of negotiating.  It took blood, sweat, tears and tortured discussions to get there, but EU countries at last backed the deal with the Mercosur bloc — paving the way to create a free trade area that covers more than 700 million people across Europe and Latin America.  The agreement, which awaits approval from the European Parliament, will eliminate more than 90 percent of tariffs on EU exports. European shoppers will be able to dine on grass-fed beef from the Argentinian pampas. Brazilian drivers will see import duties on German motors come down.  As for the accord’s economic impact, well, that pales in comparison with the epic battles over it: The European Commission estimates it will add €77.6 billion (or 0.05 percent) to the EU economy by 2040.  Like in any deal, there are winners and losers. POLITICO takes you through who is uncorking their Malbec, and who, on the other hand, is crying into the Bordeaux. WINNERS Giorgia Meloni Italy’s prime minister has done it again. Giorgia Meloni saw which way the political winds were blowing and skillfully extracted last-minute concessions for Italian farmers after threatening to throw her weight behind French opposition to the deal.  The end result? In exchange for its support, Rome was able to secure farm market safeguards and promises of fresh agriculture funding from the European Commission — wins that the government can trumpet in front of voters back home. It also means that Meloni has picked the winning side once more, coming off as the team player despite the last-minute holdup. All in all, yet another laurel in Rome’s crown.  The German car industry  Das Auto hasn’t had much reason to cheer of late, but Mercosur finally gives reason to celebrate. Germany’s famed automotive sector will have easier access to consumers in LatAm. Lower tariffs mean, all things being equal, more sales and a boost to the bottom line for companies like Volkswagen and BMW. There are a few catches. Tariffs, now at 35 percent, aren’t coming down all at once. At the behest of Brazil, which hosts an auto industry of its own, the removal of trade barriers will be staggered. Electric vehicles will be given preferential treatment, an area that Europe’s been lagging behind on.  Ursula von der Leyen Mercosur is a bittersweet triumph for European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Since shaking hands on the deal with Mercosur leaders more than a year ago, her team has bent over backwards to accommodate the demands of the skeptics and build the all-important qualified majority that finally materialized Friday. Expect a victory lap next week, when the Berlaymont boss travels to Paraguay to sign the agreement. Giorgia Meloni saw which way the political winds were blowing and skillfully extracted last-minute concessions for Italian farmers after threatening to throw her weight behind French opposition to the deal. | Ettore Ferrari/EPA On the international stage, it also helps burnish Brussels’ standing at a time when the bloc looks like a lumbering dinosaur, consistently outmaneuvered by the U.S. and China. A large-scale trade deal shows that the rules-based international order that the EU so cherishes is still alive, even as the U.S. whisked away a South American leader in chains.  But the deal came at a very high cost. Von der Leyen had to promise EU farmers €45 billion in subsidies to win them over, backtracking on efforts to rein in agricultural support in the EU budget and invest more in innovation and growth.   Europe’s farmers  Speaking of farmers, going by the headlines you could be forgiven for thinking that Mercosur is an unmitigated disaster. Surely innumerable tons of South American produce sold at rock-bottom prices are about to drive the hard-working French or Polish plowman off his land, right?  The reality is a little bit more complicated. The deal comes with strict quotas for categories ranging from beef to poultry. In effect, Latin American farmers will be limited to exporting a couple of chicken breasts per European person per year. Meanwhile, the deal recognizes special protections for European producers for specialty products like Italian parmesan or French wine, who stand to benefit from the expanded market. So much for the agri-pocalpyse now.  Mercosur is a bittersweet triumph for European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. | Olivier Matthys/EPA Then there’s the matter of the €45 billion of subsidies going into farmers’ pockets, and it’s hard not to conclude that — despite all the tractor protests and manure fights in downtown Brussels — the deal doesn’t smell too bad after all.  LOSERS Emmanuel Macron  There’s been no one high-ranking politician more steadfast in their opposition to the trade agreement than France’s President Emmanuel Macron who, under enormous domestic political pressure, has consistently opposed the deal. It’s no surprise then that France joined Poland, Austria, Ireland and Hungary to unsuccessfully vote against Mercosur.  The former investment banker might be a free-trading capitalist at heart, but he knows well that, domestically, the deal is seen as a knife in the back of long-suffering Gallic growers. Macron, who is burning through prime ministers at rates previously reserved for political basket cases like Italy, has had precious few wins recently. Torpedoing the free trade agreement, or at least delaying it further, would have been proof that the lame-duck French president still had some sway on the European stage.  Surely innumerable tons of South American produce sold at rock-bottom prices are about to drive the hard-working French or Polish plowman off his land, right? | Darek Delmanowicz/EPA Macron made a valiant attempt to rally the troops for a last-minute counterattack, and at one point it looked like he had a good chance to throw a wrench in the works after wooing Italy’s Meloni. That’s all come to nought. After this latest defeat, expect more lambasting of the French president in the national media, as Macron continues his slow-motion tumble down from the Olympian heights of the Élysée Palace.  Donald Trump Coming within days of the U.S. mission to snatch Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and put him on trial in New York, the Mercosur deal finally shows that Europe has no shortage of soft power to work constructively with like-minded partners — if it actually has the wit to make use of it smartly.  Any trade deal should be seen as a win-win proposition for both sides, and that is just not the way U.S. President Donald Trump and his art of the geopolitical shakedown works. It also has the incidental benefit of strengthening his adversaries — including Brazilian President and Mercosur head honcho Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — who showed extraordinary patience as he waited on the EU to get their act together (and nurtured a public bromance with Macron even as the trade talks were deadlocked). China  China has been expanding exports to Latin America, particularly Brazil, during the decades when the EU was negotiating the Mercosur trade deal. The EU-Mercosur deal is an opportunity for Europe to claw back some market share, especially in competitive sectors like automotive, machines and aviation. The deal also strengthens the EU’s hand on staying on top when it comes to direct investments, an area where European companies are still outshining their Chinese competitors. Emmanuel Macron made a valiant attempt to rally the troops for a last-minute counterattack, and at one point it looked like he had a good chance to throw a wrench in the works after wooing Italy’s Meloni. | Pool photo by Ludovic Marin/EPA More politically, China has somewhat succeeded in drawing countries like Brazil away from Western points of view, for instance via the BRICS grouping, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, and other developing economies. Because the deal is not only about trade but also creates deeper political cooperation, Lula and his Mercosur counterparts become more closely linked to Europe. The Amazon rainforest  Unfortunately, for the world’s ecosystem, Mercosur means one thing: burn, baby, burn. The pastures that feed Brazil’s herds come at the expense of the nation’s once-sprawling, now-shrinking tropical rainforest. Put simply, more beef for Europe means less trees for the world. It’s not all bad news for the climate. The trade deal does include both mandatory safeguards against illegal deforestation, as well as a commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement for its signatories. 

LONDON — Europe’s leaders have discovered yet another hill they are unwilling to die on: their long-held dream of a world fighting climate change together. President Donald Trump launched his most far-reaching attack on the international climate process Wednesday by ordering the U.S. to withdraw from the 1992 treaty that underpins most global attempts to stave off global warming. It means the world’s richest country and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter will play no further part in United Nations-led efforts to mitigate climate change — a position that could prove impossible to reverse by a future U.S. administration. European leaders might, then, have been expected to respond with loud condemnation. But the silence was deafening. Ursula von der Leyen? Schtum. Keir Starmer? Crickets. Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, was low-key. On Thursday, in a speech to French diplomats, the French president admitted the U.S. attacks on multilateralism, including Wednesday’s pledge to withdraw from 66 international organizations spanning environmental, social and human rights issues — the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) among them — “weakens all the bodies through which we can resolve common issues.” But Macron warned his officials: “We are not here to comment, we are here to act … If we have an intelligent response to offer, we do so. If we don’t have an intelligent response to offer, we look elsewhere.” It’s a far cry from 2017, when leaders across Europe lined up to hammer Trump for ditching the Paris Agreement — a less serious violation of the international regime, given there are now questions about whether the U.S. will ever be able to rejoin the UNFCCC, in which the Paris Agreement resides. But the world looks very different now than it did in 2017. Climate change concerns have been sucked into the black hole of Trump’s geopolitical tumult, and even if Europeans feel aggrieved, little sign of it has escaped the event horizon. “With Europeans still critically reliant on U.S. intelligence and being able to purchase U.S. arms to ensure Ukraine’s survival, it makes no sense to criticize Trump’s latest assault on combating climate change, just as they haven’t criticized the Venezuela operation,” said Robin Niblett, former director of the Chatham House foreign affairs think tank.  PICK YOUR BATTLES EU leaders have demonstrated this week that violations of international law and multilateral trust are way below the bar for confronting the Trump administration. Only a direct threat to invade European territory in Greenland has stirred Europe’s leaders to respond. “This is the bigger picture we’re seeing — European leaders essentially sort of pick their battles in this environment, and unfortunately, the UNFCCC process isn’t their biggest priority right now,” said Susi Dennison, senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.  “The White House doesn’t care about environment, health or suffer[ing] of people,” Teresa Ribera said on social media. | Oscar del Pozo/AFP via Getty Images On top of that, she added, Trump’s attacks on climate action have lost their shock value. Wednesday’s announcement is “consistent with the withdrawal from climate action as a specific goal of the administration,” she said.  Officials in the offices of the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and the European Commission declined requests from POLITICO to comment on the announcement that the U.S. would ditch the UNFCCC and also withdraw from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. climate science body, and the Green Climate Fund.  The response was left to a smattering of lowly environment ministers, who expressed a mixture of exasperation and anger but very little shock at the announcement. (German Climate Minister Carsten Schneider simply noted that it “comes as no surprise.”)  One of the most prominent criticisms came from European Commission Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera, a Spanish socialist who is one of the EU executive’s most outspoken advocates for strong climate action. “The White House doesn’t care about environment, health or suffer[ing] of people,” she said on social media. Meanwhile, in the U.K., the populist right-wing Reform party, currently leading in the polls, said Britain should follow suit and ditch the climate treaty. EUROPE ALONE Schneider, the German minister, also echoed a common view in saying the move would leave the U.S. isolated on the international stage. But Washington’s exit also leaves the Europeans without a key ally in global negotiations.  Europe discovered what it meant for the U.S. to be absent from U.N. climate talks in Brazil last year when the Trump administration decided to send no delegates. A coalition of emerging economies effectively quashed any chance that the conference would make meaningful advances or that the Europeans would pursue their agenda. Legal opinions vary on whether a U.S. reentry to the UNFCCC would be as straightforward as a presidential decree or if it would require the U.S. Senate to ratify the deal, as it did in the early 1990s. The chance of a lockout raises the prospect of a permanent rebalancing of power inside the U.N. climate process. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the IPCC comes as it drafts its next round of vital climate science reports. While the move doesn’t stop individual U.S. scientists from contributing, Washington will not get to influence the report summaries that end up informing policymakers, which need to be signed off on by all governments.  As with the U.N. climate talks, others may step into the vacuum to take advantage of the U.S. absence. But Dennison thinks it won’t be the Europeans.  “I’m no longer even remotely optimistic that Europe is capable right now of playing that role,” she said, pointing to the growing divisions over climate action among EU governments and the rollbacks of key green legislation over the past year. “I don’t think that Europeans are going to step into any void.” Karl Mathiesen and Charlie Cooper reported from London. Zia Weise reported from Brussels. Josh Groeneveld contributed reporting from Berlin. Nicolas Camut contributed reporting from Paris. Emilio Casaliccio contributed reporting from London.

PARIS — How do you celebrate a major anniversary of the world’s most significant climate treaty while deprioritizing the fight against climate change?   That’s the quandary in Paris heading into Friday, when the landmark Paris Agreement turns 10.   With budgets strapped and the fight against climate change losing political momentum, the only major celebration planned by the French government consists of a reception inside the Ministry of Ecological Transition hosted by the minister, Monique Barbut, according to the invitation card seen by POLITICO.  Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu won’t be there, and it’s unclear if President Emmanuel Macron will attend.  Lecornu will be talking about health care in the region of Eure, where he’s from. Macron’s plans for Friday are not yet public, but the day before he’ll address the “consequences of misinformation on climate change” as part of a nationwide tour to speak with French citizens about technology and misinformation.  According to two ministerial advisers, the Elysée Palace had initially planned to organize an event, details of which were not released, but it was canceled at the last minute. When contacted about the plans, the Elysée did not respond.  Even if Macron ends up attending the ministerial event, the muted nature of the celebration is both a symptom of the political backlash against Europe’s green push and a metaphor for the Paris Agreement’s increasingly imperiled legacy — sometimes at the hands of France itself, which had been supposed to act as guarantor of the accord.  “France wants to be the guardian of the Paris Agreement, [but] it also needs to implement it,” said Lorelei Limousin, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace. “That means really putting the resources in place, particularly financial resources, to move away from fossil fuels, both in France and internationally.”  PARIS AGREEMENT’S BIRTHDAY PLANNER  Before being appointed to government, Barbut was Macron’s special climate envoy and had been tasked with organizing the treaty’s celebration. She told POLITICO in June that she hoped to use the annual Paris Peace Forum to celebrate the anniversary, then bring together hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists in late November and welcome them at the Elysée.   Those events, which have already come and gone, were supposed to be followed by a grand finale on Friday.   According to one of the ministerial advisers previously cited, the moratorium on government communications spending introduced in October by the prime minister threw a wrench in those plans.   “We’d like to do something more festive, but the problem is that we have no money,” the adviser said.   Environmentalists say the muted plans point to a government that remains mired in crisis and shows little interest in prioritizing climate change. Lecornu is laser-focused on getting a budget passed before the end of the year, whereas Macron’s packed agenda sees him hopscotching across the globe to tackle geopolitical crises and touring France to talk about his push to regulate social media.  Anne Bringault, program director at the Climate Action Network, accused the government of trying to minimize the anniversary of the treaty “on the sly” because there “is no political support” for a celebration. Some hope the government will use the occasion to present an update of its climate roadmap, the national low-carbon strategy, which is more than two years overdue.  They also still hope that Lecornu will change his plans and show up to mark the occasion. Apart from his trip to his fiefdom in the Eure, the prime minister’s schedule shows no appointments. His office told POLITICO that Lecornu has no plans to change his schedule for the time being.  As for Macron, it’s still unclear what he’ll be doing on Friday. This story is adapted from an article published by POLITICO in French.

BRUSSELS — The European Union will “think twice” before considering backing weak agreements at COP climate summits in the future, a Polish negotiator has warned. At this year’s COP30 climate conference in Brazil, the EU struggled to find allies to push for more ambitious climate action, and at one point threatened to walk away without signing a deal. The United States, its historical partner, was notably absent from the meeting. That’s a lesson learned, according to Katarzyna Wrona, Poland’s negotiator in the talks, who was also part of the EU’s delegation at the summit. “This COP happened in a very difficult geopolitical situation … We felt a very strong pressure from emerging economies but also from other parties, on financing, on trade,” she said at POLITICO’s Sustainable Future Summit. And “we had to really think very carefully whether we were in a position to support [the final deal], and we did, for the sake of multilateralism,” she added. “But I’m not sure … that the EU will be ready to take [this position] in the future,” Wrona warned. “Because something has changed, and we will surely think twice before we evaluate a deal that does not really bring much in terms of following up on the commitments that were undertaken,” she said. Also speaking on the panel, Elif Gökçe Öz, environmental counsellor at the permanent delegation of Turkey to the EU, said it would “be important for the EU … to forge alternative alliances in the COP negotiation process,” as global power dynamics shift. Wrona replied that the EU is “ready to work” with those that show ambition to reduce their emissions. “But it has to be very clearly … that the support is not limitless and it’s not unconditional,” she added.

BELÉM, Brazil — The State Department helped stymie U.S. officials’ ability to attend this year’s United Nations climate talks here, Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse alleged Friday. The lawmaker from Rhode Island is the sole U.S. government presence at the COP30 summit, which has drawn an estimatevd 56,000 diplomats, activists, businesspeople, journalists and others to the Amazonian port city of Belém. He’s meeting with officials and other delegates to share a message that President Donald Trump and his aggressive championing of fossil fuels don’t represent the entire United States. The U.S. government shutdown that ended this week was the main complication to the journey, but Whitehouse said it wasn’t the only barrier. He told reporters that the State Department refused to sponsor his efforts to receive United Nations credentials to attend the summit — a departure from the department’s past practice. “There was a very deliberate pattern of behavior to try to discourage official attendance here, including making it just logistically really challenging,” said Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment but pointed to an earlier statement from a White House official saying that Trump “is directly engaging with leaders around the world on energy issues.” Last week, while other world leaders were in Belém, U.S. officials including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright promoted American natural gas at an international energy gathering in Greece. “The Green New Scam would have killed America if President Trump had not been elected to implement his very popular and commonsense energy agenda,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in her previous response to questions from POLITICO’s E&E News. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.” Without accreditation, it would have been pointless to fly to Belém, said Whitehouse, who was finally able to obtain a badge providing access to the summit. “We couldn’t get these,” he said, raising the badge. “You can’t blame the shutdown on the State Department being unwilling to get us badged in.” This year’s COP30 talks come as Trump doubles down on fossil fuel drilling and just months before the U.S. officially exits the 2015 Paris climate agreement for the second time. Talks here are tied up over how to ensure countries not only commit to stronger action to halt rising temperatures but also act on those pledges. While the Trump administration declined to send anyone to the climate summit and no members of Congress have attended aside from Whitehouse, the United States’ main economic rival — China — had registered 789 delegates, according to an independent analysis of U.N. data. That’s the second biggest delegation aside from that of the host nation, Brazil, which registered 3,805. Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential contender, also made a much-publicized swing through Belém this week. The lack of an official U.S. delegation has brought a mixed reaction. Some delegates have lamented the loss of U.S. experience and ability to unlock action when talks reach a standstill. But others have expressed relief that the current administration has stayed away. “Because of the Trump administration, I think the view is that’s actually better,” Whitehouse said. “I mean, as long as we’re gonna just be here and be up to no good and running around telling lies and bullying people, great, stay away, we’ll make better progress without you.” Former Vice President Al Gore, who is also attending the summit, echoed that sentiment in an interview Thursday with POLITICO. “There are two schools of thought” about the U.S. absence, Gore said. “The first says it’s damaging that no one from the U.S. government is here. But the other school of thought is, since [Trump is] so psychopathically focused on destroying any potential solutions to the climate crisis, it’s just as well that he has stayed away and that his minions are not here either.” Trump’s snub of the summit also snagged Whitehouse’s efforts to attend as a member of the coequal legislative branch, the senator’s team said. Congressional representatives typically receive official badges for attendance at the annual climate conferences as part of a country delegation. The State Department said it would not provide those badges because the Trump administration was not sending an official delegation, according to Whitehouse’s team. Sens. John Curtis (R-Utah) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) had been slated to lead a bipartisan delegation to COP30 but canceled at the last minute due to the shutdown. Coons’ office said people there were under the impression that the State Department would not sponsor congressional delegations during the government shutdown. In the long run, Whitehouse said, he hopes that the U.S. can return to the global stage as a cooperative partner and undo any damage that has been done in its absence. He said the U.S. could suffer lasting repercussions to its reputation if it walks away from negotiations and champions fossil fuels despite having the best science and resources to counter climate change — especially as the harms from worsening climate-induced wildfires, heat waves, storms and hurricanes grow. “The quicker we can get back to being the good guys again, the better,” Whitehouse said. But, in the short term at least, that would involve Democrats winning more elections, Whitehouse noted at a separate event at the TED Countdown House outside the COP30 venue. He said Democrats had been too timid on climate issues when in control of Congress and the White House, often settling for “half-measures.” “It helps if you want to win elections in order to achieve political power to have shown that when you do have political power, you use it energetically and smartly and are willing to be bold,” he said. “Unfortunately, on climate, that has not been us.” Amelia Davidson contributed to this report from Washington.

Ban Ki-moon is the eighth secretary-general of the U.N. and the co-chair of the Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens. Ana Toni is the CEO of COP30. As world leaders gather in Belém, Brazil for this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), we are standing at a global tipping point. 2024 broke temperature records, as the world temporarily surpassed the 1.5 degrees Celsius target for the first time. And now, we’re on track to cross it permanently within just five years. This means adaptation action has never been more vital for our survival. From the year 2000 to 2019, climate change already cost the world’s most vulnerable countries an estimated $525 billion. This burden only continues to rise, putting lives at risk and undoing hard-won development gains, with global annual damages likely to land somewhere between $19 trillion and $59 trillion in 2050. Even more sobering, the world economy is already locked into a 19 percent loss of income by 2050 due to climate change, no matter how successful today’s mitigation efforts are. This makes one thing clear: The consequence of inaction is far greater than the consequence of action. The world must stop seeing adaptation as a cost to bear but as an investment that strengthens economies and builds healthier, more secure communities. Every dollar invested in adaptation can generate more than 10 times that in benefits through avoided losses, as well as induced economic, social and environmental benefits. Every dollar invested in agricultural research and development generates similar returns for smallholder farmers, vulnerable communities and ecosystems too. This remains true even if climate-related disasters don’t occur. Effective adaptation does more than save lives — it makes the economic case for resilience. And if we really want to tackle the crises of today’s world, we need to put people — especially those most vulnerable — at the center of all our conversations and efforts. Those least responsible for climate change are the ones our financing must reach. Here, locally led adaptation provides a path forward, focusing on giving communities agency over their futures, addressing structural inequalities and enhancing local capacities. Today, more than 2 billion people depend on smallholder farms for their livelihoods, but as little as 1.7 percent of climate finance reaches Indigenous communities and locally operated farms. Small-scale agri-food systems, which are essential to many in developing countries, receive a mere 0.8 percent of international climate finance. This is deeply unjust. These are the people and systems most threatened by climate impacts — and they’re often the best-placed ones to deliver locally effective and regionally adaptive solutions. To that end, appropriate investments in global networks like the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) could accelerate and scale technologies that can be adopted by these local systems. These tools could then be used to improve resilience and increase productivity in low- and middle-income countries, while also reducing inequalities and advancing gender equity and social inclusion. The world economy is already locked into a 19 percent loss of income by 2050 due to climate change. | Albert Llop/Getty Images Scaling such efforts will be crucial in moving toward systemic climate solutions. Our ambition is to move from negotiation to implementation to protect lives, safeguard assets and advance equity. But it’s important to remember that adaptation is distinct — it is inherently local; shaped by geography, communities and governance systems. Meeting this challenge will require more than just pledges. It will necessitate high-quality public and private adaptation finance that is accessible to vulnerable countries and communities. That’s why governments around the world — especially those in high-income countries — must design institutional arrangements and policies that raise additional public funds, incentivize markets and embed resilience into every investment decision. The decade since the Paris Agreement laid the foundations for a world at peace with the planet. And with COP30 now taking place in the heart of the Amazon, we must make adaptation a global priority and see resilience as the investment agenda of the 21st century. At its core, climate finance should be driving development pathways that put people first. In Belém, leaders must now close the adaptation finance gap and ensure funding reaches those on the front lines. They need to back investable national resilience strategies, replicate successful initiatives and put resilience at the center of financial decision-making. COP30 needs to be transformative and lead to markets that reward resilience, communities that are better protected and economies built on firmer, more climate-resilient foundations. Let this be the moment we finally move from awareness to alignment, and from ambition to action. Our collective survival depends on it. Question is, will our leaders have the political will to seize it?

It’s been a decade since the U.S. and Europe pushed the world to embrace a historic agreement to stop the planet’s runaway warming. The deal among nearly 200 nations offered a potential “turning point for the world,” then-U.S. President Barack Obama said. Eventually, almost every country on Earth signed the 2015 Paris Agreement, a pact whose success would rest on peer pressure, rising ambition and the economics of a clean energy revolution. But 10 years later, the actions needed to fulfill those hopes are falling short. The United States has quit the deal — twice. President Donald Trump is throttling green energy projects at home and finding allies to help him undermine climate initiatives abroad, while inking trade deals that commit countries to buying more U.S. fossil fuels. Europe remains on track to meet its climate commitments, but its resolve is wavering, as price-weary voters and the rise of far-right parties raise doubts about how quickly the bloc can deliver its pledge to turn away from fossil fuels. Paris has helped ingrain climate change awareness in popular culture and policy, led countries and companies to pledge to cut their carbon pollution to zero and helped steer a wave of investments into clean energy. Scientists say it appears to have lessened the odds of the most catastrophic levels of warming. On the downside, oil and gas production hasn’t yet peaked, and climate pollution and temperatures are still rising — with the latter just tenths of a degree from the tipping point agreed in Paris. But the costs of green energy have fallen so much that, in most parts of the world, it’s the cheapest form of power and is being installed at rates unthinkable 10 years ago. World leaders and diplomats who are in Brazil starting this week for the United Nations’ annual climate talks will face a test to stand up for Paris in the face of Trump’s opposition while highlighting that its goal are both necessary and beneficial. The summit in the Amazonian port city of Belém was supposed to be the place where rich and poor countries would celebrate their progress and commit themselves to ever-sharper cuts in greenhouse gas pollution. Instead, U.S. contempt for global climate efforts and a muddled message from Europe are adding headwinds to a moment that is far more turbulent than the one in which the Paris Agreement was adopted. Some climate veterans are still optimists — to a point. “I think that the basic architecture is resistant to Trump’s destruction,” said John Podesta, chair of the board of the liberal Center for American Progress, who coordinated climate policy under Obama and former President Joe Biden. But that resistance could wilt if the U.S. stays outside the agreement, depriving the climate movement of American leadership and support, he said. “If all that’s gone, and it’s gone for a long time, I don’t know whether the structure holds together,” Podesta added. Other climate diplomats say the cooperative spirit of 2015 would be hard to recreate now, which is why acting on Paris is so essential. “If we had to renegotiate Paris today, we’d never get the agreement that we had 10 years ago,” said Rachel Kyte, the United Kingdom’s special climate representative. “But we can also look to these extraordinary data points, which show that the direction of travel is very clear,” she said, referring to growth of clean energy. “And most people who protect where their money is going to be are interested in that direction of travel.” THE PARIS PARADOX One thing that hasn’t faded is the business case for clean energy. If anything, the economic drivers behind the investments that Paris helped unleash have surpassed even what the Paris deal’s authors anticipated. But the political will to keep countries driving forward has stalled in some places as the United States — the world’s largest economy, sole military superpower and historically biggest climate polluter — attacks its very foundation. Trump’s attempts to undermine the agreement, summed up by the 2017 White House slogan “Pittsburgh, not Paris,” has affected European ambitions as well, French climate diplomat Laurence Tubiana told reporters late last month. “I have never seen such aggressivity against national climate policy all over because of the U.S.,” said Tubiana, a key architect of the Paris Agreement. “So we are really confronted with an ideological battle, a cultural battle, where climate is in that package the U.S. government wants to defeat.” The White House said Trump is focused on developing U.S. oil and engaging with world leaders on energy issues, rather than what it dubs the “green new scam.” The U.S. will not send high-level representatives to COP30. “The Green New Scam would have killed America if President Trump had not been elected to implement his commonsense energy agenda,” said Taylor Rogers, a spokesperson. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.” Trump is not the only challenge facing Paris, of course. Even under Obama, the U.S. insisted that the Paris climate pollution targets had to be nonbinding, avoiding the need for a Senate ratification vote that would most likely fail. But unlike previous climate pacts that the U.S. had declined to join, all countries — including, most notably, China — would have to submit a pollution-cutting plan. The accord left it up to the governments themselves to carry out their own pledges and to push laggards to do better. An unusual confluence of political winds helped drive the bargaining. Obama, who was staking part of his legacy on getting a global climate agreement, had spent the year leading up to Paris negotiating a separate deal with China in which both countries committed to cutting their world-leading pollution. France, the host of the Paris talks, was also determined to strike a worldwide pact. In the year that followed, more than 160 countries submitted their initial plans to tackle climate change domestically and began working to finish the rules that would undergird the agreement. “The Paris Agreement isn’t a machine that churns out ambition. It basically reflects back to us the level of ambition that we have agreed to … and suggests what else is needed to get back on track,” said Kaveh Guilanpour, vice president for international strategies at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and a negotiator for the United Kingdom during the Paris talks. “Whether countries do that or not, it’s essentially then a matter for them.” Catherine McKenna, Canada’s former environment minister and a lead negotiator of the Paris Agreement’s carbon crediting mechanism, called the deal an “incredible feat” — but not a self-executing one. “The problem is now it’s really up to countries as well as cities, regions, companies and financial institutions to act,” she said. “It’s not a treaty thing anymore — it’s now, ‘Do the work.’” WHEN GREEN TURNS GRAY Signs of discord are not hard to find around the globe. China is tightening its grip on clean energy manufacturing and exports, ensuring more countries have access to low-cost renewables, but creating tensions in places that also want to benefit from jobs and revenue from making those goods and fear depending too much on one country. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former United Nations climate envoy, eliminated his country’s consumer carbon tax and is planning to tap more natural gas to toughen economic defenses against the United States. The European Union spent the past five years developing a vast web of green regulations and sectoral measures, and the bloc estimates that it’s roughly on track to meet those goals. But many of the EU’s 27 governments — under pressure from the rising far right, high energy prices, the decline of traditional industry and Russia’s war against Ukraine — are now demanding that the EU reevaluate many of those policies. Still, views within the bloc diverge sharply, with some pushing for small tweaks and others for rolling back large swaths of legislation. “Europe must remain a continent of consistency,” French President Emmanuel Macron said after a meeting of EU leaders in October. “It must step up on competitiveness, but it must not give up on its [climate] goals.” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in contrast, said after the same meeting that he felt vindicated about his country’s long-standing opposition to the EU’s green agenda: “In most European capitals, people today think differently about these exaggerated European climate ambitions.” Worldwide, most countries have not submitted their latest carbon-cutting plans to the United Nations. While the plans that governments have announced mostly expand on their previous ones, they still make only modest reductions against what is needed to limit Earth’s warming since the preindustrial era to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Exceeding that threshold, scientists say, would lead to more lives lost and physical and economic damage that would be ever harder to recover from with each tenth of a degree of additional warming. The U.N.’s latest report showing the gap between countries’ new pledges and the Paris targets found that the world is on track for between 2.3 and 2.5 degrees of warming, a marginal difference from plans submitted in 2020 that is largely canceled out when the U.S. pledge is omitted. Policies in place now are pointing toward 2.8 degrees of warming. “We need unprecedented cuts to greenhouse gas emissions now in an ever-compressing timeframe and amid a challenging geopolitical context,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme. But doing so also makes sense, she added. “This where the market is showing that these kind of investments in smart, clean and green is actually driving jobs and opportunities. This is where the future lies.” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message Tuesday that overshooting the 1.5-degrees target of Paris was now inevitable in the coming years imploring leaders to rapidly roll out renewables and stop expanding oil, gas and coal to ensure that overshoot was short-lived. “We’re in a huge mess,” said Bill Hare, a longtime climate scientist who founded the policy institute Climate Analytics. Greenhouse gas pollution hasn’t fallen, and action has flat lined even as climate-related disasters have increased. “I think what’s upcoming is a major test for the Paris Agreement, probably the major test. Can this agreement move forward under the weight of all of these challenges?” Hare asked. “If it can’t do that, governments are going to be asking about the benefits of it, frankly.” That doesn’t mean all is lost. In 2015, the world was headed for around 4 degrees Celsius of warming, an amount that researchers say would have been devastating for much of the planet. Today, that projection is roughly a degree Celsius lower. “I think a lot of us in Paris were very dubious at the time that we would ever limit warming to 1.5,” said Elliot Diringer, a former climate official who led the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions’ international program during the Paris talks. “The question is whether we are better off by virtue of the Paris Agreement,” he said. “I think the answer is yes. Are we where we need to be? Absolutely not.” GREEN TECHNOLOGY DEFYING EXPECTATIONS In addition, the adoption of clean energy technology has moved even faster than projected — sparking what one climate veteran has called a shift in global climate politics. “We are no longer in a world in which only climate politics has a leading role and a substantial role, but increasingly, climate economics,” said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2015. “Yes, politics is important; no longer as important as it was 10 years ago.” Annual solar deployment globally is 15 times greater than the International Energy Agency predicted in 2015, according to a recent analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a U.K. nonprofit. Renewables now account for more than 90 percent of new power capacity added globally every year, BloombergNEF reported. China is deploying record amounts of renewables and lowering costs for countries such as Brazil and Pakistan, which has seen solar installations skyrocket. Even in the United States, where Trump repealed many of Biden’s tax breaks and other incentives, BloombergNEF predicts that power companies will continue to deploy green sources, in large part because they’re often the fastest source of new electricity. Costs for wind and batteries and falling, too. Electric vehicle sales are soaring in many countries, thanks in large part to the huge number of inexpensive vehicles being pumped out by China’s BYD, the world’s largest EV-maker. Worldwide clean energy investments are now twice as much as fossil fuels spending, according to the International Energy Agency. “Today, you can actually talk about deploying clean energy technologies just because of their cost competitiveness and ability to lower energy system costs,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director of modeling and analysis at the research institution Energy Innovation. “You don’t actually even have to say ‘climate’ for a lot of them, and that just wasn’t true 10 years ago.” The economic trends of the past decade have been striking, said Todd Stern, the U.S. climate envoy who negotiated the Paris Agreement. “Paris is something that was seen all over the world, seen by other countries, seen in boardrooms, as the first time in more than 20 years when you finally got heads of government saying, ‘Yes, let’s do this,’” he said. “And that’s not the only reason why there was tremendous technological development, but it sure didn’t hurt.” Still, limits exist to how far businesses can take the clean energy transition on their own. “You need government intervention of some kind, whether that’s a stick or a carrot, to push the economy towards a low-carbon trajectory,” said Andrew Wilson, deputy secretary general of policy at the International Chamber of Commerce. “If governments press the brakes on climate action or seriously start to soft pedal, then it does have a limiting effect.” Brazil, the host of COP30, says it wants to demonstrate that multilateralism still works and is relevant to peoples’ lives and capable of addressing the climate impacts communities around the world are facing. But the goal of this year’s talks might be even more straightforward, said Guilanpour, the former negotiator. “If we come out of COP30 demonstrating that the Paris Agreement is alive and functioning,” he said, “I think in the current context, that is pretty newsworthy of itself.” Nicolas Camut in Paris, Zi-Ann Lum in Ottawa, Karl Mathiesen in London and Zia Weise in Brussels contributed to this report.

BRUSSELS — The European Union’s environment ministers struck a deal watering down a proposed 2040 target for cutting planet-warming emissions and set a new 2035 climate plan. Following marathon negotiations all day Tuesday and into Wednesday morning, ministers unanimously approved the bloc’s long-overdue climate plan, rescuing the EU from the international embarrassment of showing up empty handed this month’s COP30 summit. The plan, which is a requirement under the Paris Agreement, sets a new goal to slash EU emissions between 66.25 percent and 72.5 percent below 1990 levels until 2035. That plan is not legally binding but sets the direction of EU climate policy for the coming five years. The range is similar to an informal statement that the EU presented at a climate summit in New York in September. Ministers also adopted a legally-binding target for cutting emissions in the EU by 85 percent by 2040. The deal mandates that another 5 percent reduction be achieved by outsourcing pollution cuts abroad through the purchase of international carbon credits. On top of that, governments would be allowed to use credits to outsource another 5 percentage points of their national emissions reduction goals. Ministers also backed a wide-ranging review clause that allows the EU to adjust its 2040 target in the future if climate policy proves to have negative impacts on the EU’s economy. The deal also foresees a one-year delay to the implementation of the EU’s new carbon market for heating and car emissions, which is set to start in 2027. Hungary, Slovakia and Poland did not support the 2040 deal, while Bulgaria and Belgium abstained. The rest of the EU27 countries backed it. Lawmakers in the European Parliament now have to agree on their own position on the 2040 climate target and negotiate with the Council of the EU before the target becomes law. 

Listen on * Spotify * Apple Music * Amazon Music Wenige Tage vor Beginn der Weltklimakonferenz in Brasilien ringen die EU-Umweltminister in Brüssel um das neue Klimaziel für 2040 – minus 90 Prozent CO₂-Emissionen. Berlin will möglichst wenig Emissionen ins Ausland verlagern, Paris pocht auf großzügige Carbon Credits und eine Revisionsklausel, die Ziele bei steigenden Energiepreisen lockern könnte.Rixa Fürsen spricht mit Josh Groeneveld über die schwierige Suche nach einem europäischen Kompromiss. Außerdem: was zehn Jahre nach dem Pariser Abkommen von den großen Versprechen geblieben ist. Der Link zum kostenlosen Probe-Abo vom Premium Briefing POLITICO Pro Energie & Klima am Morgen. https://www.politico.eu/politico-pro-energie-klima-am-morgen-newsletter-trial/ Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es morgens um 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team bringen euch jeden Morgen auf den neuesten Stand in Sachen Politik — kompakt, europäisch, hintergründig. Und für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Unser Berlin Playbook-Newsletter liefert jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Hier gibt es alle Informationen und das kostenlose Playbook-Abo. Mehr von Berlin Playbook-Host und Executive Editor von POLITICO in Deutschland, Gordon Repinski, gibt es auch hier:   Instagram: @gordon.repinski | X: @GordonRepinski.

New national plans designed to more aggressively combat climate change would hardly dent already dangerously high global temperature projections, according to a United Nations report published Tuesday. The findings underscore the task at hand for nations as they prepare for COP30 climate negotiations that begin Nov. 10 in Brazil. The U.N. report showed nations are on a path that would bake in long-term changes to the planet such as more deadly heatwaves, runaway sea level rise and likelier extreme events like wildfires and droughts. Temperatures would rise between 2.3 and 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era levels by 2100 through policies governments included in their formal climate strategies last week, the annual U.N. emissions gap analysis found. That trajectory would far exceed the 2015 Paris climate agreement goals of keeping increases “well below” 2 C and the more ambitious 1.5 C mark. “The bottom line is that nations have had three attempts to hit the mark with their Paris Agreement pledges, and each time they have landed off target,” the report said. “We still need unprecedented cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, in an ever-compressing timeframe, amid a challenging geopolitical context.” While the pathway amounts to progress since the Paris climate agreement, when temperatures were headed for 4 C of warming, it still is far from enough, the report said. The U.N. reached the grim conclusion that multi-decadal temperature increase will surpass 1.5 C for the first time within the next decade. Doing so would cross a critical political threshold. Nations have largely centered their strategies on avoiding that mark, citing dire predictions from a 2018 U.N. special report on climate science that warned of the enhanced likelihood of provoking irreversible climate “tipping points.” “The Paris Agreement does not set a target date or expiration for its temperature goal. It is widely understood as a legal, moral and political obligation,” the report said, noting that, “[e]very fraction of a degree of global warming matters.” Countries are actually falling further behind their original pledges: Nearly all the improvements — accounting for 0.1 C of warming — from the national plans submitted in 2020, when nations were on path for 2.6 to 2.8 C, are due to methodological changes. The United States’ second withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement under President Donald Trump would erase another 0.1 C of progress, the U.N. said. Trump will exacerbate the issue as he sidelines the world’s largest economy and second-highest emitter. The U.N. found recent policy reversals would raise U.S. emissions by 1 gigaton through 2030, a significant increase compared to former President Joe Biden’s goal to cut U.S. emissions to roughly 3 gigatons that year. Pollution trends are going in the wrong direction globally, the report states. Global greenhouse gases rose 2.3 percent from 2023 levels, far exceeding the 1.6 percent increase between 2022 and 2023 and four times faster than the average annual growth rate in the 2010s. Land-use change and deforestation drove emissions higher in 2024, combined with high fossil fuel consumption. The U.N. said the goal is now to limit “overshoot” of 1.5 C — which acknowledges the reality that nations are heading north of the goal — and eventually reducing global temperatures. The report assessed a scenario with 66 percent likelihood of keeping that overshoot within 0.3 C and bringing temperatures back under 1.5 C by 2100. But most nations are not even close to implementing all the policies for achieving their 2030 goals, with the world currently on pace for 2.8 C of warming. And just 60 parties to the Paris Agreement — not even one-third of the total — filed their nationally determined contributions, the national plans due every five years, by the Sept. 30 deadline. That already was months after the original February deadline. G20 nations, which outside of African Union nations account for 77 percent of global greenhouse gases, must lead the way, the U.N. said. So far, just seven G20 members have finalized their latest NDCs while another three have announced informal targets. The G20 proposals are also lacking overall, as none strengthened their 2030 targets, the U.N. said. “Accelerated mitigation action provides benefits and opportunities,” the report said, adding, “The new NDCs and current geopolitical situation do not provide promising signs that this will happen, but that is what countries and the multilateral processes must resolve to affirm collective commitment and confidence in achieving the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.”