The European Union promised to reduce its emissions 20 percent by 2020. Did it happen? Credit...Mike Haddad Hindsight is a series from the Headway team looking back at predictions and promises from the past. As the 2009 global climate summit in Copenhagen approached, the European Union raced to announce an ambitious target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The bloc’s leaders worked to smooth over the competing interests of more than two dozen members, settling on a three-part plan that it promised to meet by 2020, nicknamed the 20-20-20 Pledge: The bloc would reduce its emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels, increase renewable energy to 20 percent of electricity use, and increase energy efficiency by 20 percent. By the 2020 deadline, the European Union had achieved two of its three goals - an example of a major emitter achieving a climate pledge. Overall emissions were 24 percent lower than in 1990, by the bloc’s accounting, and renewable energy was about 20 percent of its electricity use. But many climate scientists and others involved in the process question the European Union’s accounting. There were stumbling blocks in the European Union’s plan to lower its carbon output. When it began in 2005, the bloc’s emissions trading system was the world’s most ambitious effort to put a price on polluting with carbon. But early on, that price was low enough that some considered the system worse than useless. By 2013, concerns about the system’s viability were so dire that the European Parliament stepped in to lift the price of carbon. Britain went even further, fixing the minimum price of carbon for power producers. These changes helped to bring about a shift: By 2017, coal had fallen to 7 percent of Britain’s electricity generation from 40 percent in 2013. As coal use declined across Europe, the power sector shifted to renewable sources. But that created its own controversy. “A fundamental mistake was made at the... |