Below you will find the interview with Jos Delbeke, architect of the European Union climate policies.

Jos is the former Director General for Climate Action at the European Commission and works as a professor at KU Leuven and the European University Institute. Kornelis Blok had a conversation with him where he shares his broad experience with climate policy and negotiations in the last decades. We are sure you are going to learn a lot from his experience.

Key takeaways

• Jos Delbeke considers carbon pricing a successful policy. He explains that putting a price on carbon is a very important element because it’s a horizontal incentive to economic operators and it works in the long term. In contrast, taxation is a very difficult issue to work with within the European Union because taxation is always embedded in national policy.
• In his experience, one policy that did not work was the voluntary approach. An example is an effort to implement it in the car industry, it did not work because car manufacturing is a very competitive business and new technology is quite expensive.
• His experience with the “Paris Agreement”: “So the Paris Agreement, seen in hindsight, was a little wonder that we could have ambitious targets adopted with consensus and with action by everybody on board. So it’s a very important one. Nevertheless, looking back, the implementation needs to improve. Now the implementation is action at the level of the states involved, and that is where there is a bit of a weakness because states may sign up for a treaty and then may forget to implement the treaty. So implementation is really an issue we have to continue to work on and it is a work in progress. Let’s face it, that’s the hardest bit of implementing an agreement. You know, having policies, measures, pricing systems geared up, technology put in place, geared up to the targets that were adopted.”
• According to him, for the “one-degree” target to be feasible in the current time frame, it is needed that parties involved go massively to implement all the measures that we know should be implemented immediately. However, it is not happening.
• “I think that the ‘well below two degrees Celsius probably was a safer way of adopting a long-term objective compared to the ‘one and a half degrees Celsius’. Because if there is one thing that I learned in my career at the European level is that if you set targets and the targets cannot be kept, then there is a bit of disappointment creeping and there is a bit of cynicism with people. So if you formulate targets, then it’s quite essential to keep up with the targets, to deliver on the targets. And failing to deliver is not good for the politics around it.”