Some argue this is the EU stepping up. “We used to have the U.S. acting as the bad cop and the EU acting as the good cop, so we as the EU have to learn to be both bad and good cop,” said a second EU negotiator. “So politicians may show outrage to push China, and on the diplomatic level we can work with China in making the COP a success.”
Others criticized Hoekstra’s response. “I think it’s counterproductive,” said Cecilia Trasi, a policy advisor at the Italian ECCO think tank. During her recent trip to China, “the common refrain,” including in conversations with officials, “was the EU is hypocritical, and it’s not doing enough to acknowledge the progress that China has made.”
New targets for 2035, required from every Paris Agreement signatory, are central to this year’s climate conference.
The EU missed the United Nations’ September deadline for the targets as its governments were unable to agree. The bloc eventually decided on an emissions cut of between 66.3 percent and 72.5 percent below 1990 levels — instead of the fixed 72.5 percent target the Commission had signaled although never clearly stated.
Under pressure from surging far-right parties and its high-polluting manufacturing industry, the EU has also embarked on a sweeping effort to deregulate and revise green policies, weakening parts of the legislative web designed to achieve its climate targets.
This hasn’t gone unnoticed in Beijing. At a meeting between high-level EU and Chinese climate officials in July, the Chinese chewed out their European counterparts for what they saw as the bloc backtracking on climate efforts, according to a person in the room.