Connie Hedegaard
Former EU Commissioner for Climate Action, former Minister in Denmark, professional Board member
Denmark
As a very young MP in the 1980’s I worked a lot with defense and security. It was Cold War. The nuclear threat was for real. The division between East and West was the dominant international political theme, and the main political divider was whether one supported the Western Alliance or not. Whether one saw oneself as a friend of the US. Or not.
I was never in doubt. NATO provided the security umbrella, and across the Atlantic we shared values. When the Berlin Wall was torn down, it was the victory of our Western, Democratic values. Our strategy had worked. Now markets would open up, Democracy would thrive, and we had to be grateful to our big ally.
For someone with this background and this profoundly positive though certainly not uncritical look at the US and transatlantic cooperation, it was quite a hard awakening some 15 years after the revolution in Eastern Europe to work as a Minister with climate change
When it comes to the fight against climate change, for decades the transatlantic discussions have been difficult and frustrating going back to the US never ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. Because as former US President Bush pronounced it: “The American lifestyle is not negotiable”.
Thus for many years Europe had to lead the fight against climate change alone, while the US were dragging its feet and for years actually did not reduce it’s emissions at all. Even when back in 2008 Barack Obama was elected for President he very early gave up trying to get climate legislation through Congress. That meant that in 2009 he and his team came more or less empty handed to the big climate conference, COP15 in Copenhagen, where the successor to the Kyoto protocol was negotiated. The world’s two largest emitters - at that time the US followed by China, today in the opposite order - played what I call the “After You, Sir”-game: The US would not move it’s position and commit to reductions as long as China did not do the same - “After you, Sir” - while China argued that as they had not created the problem in the first place there would be no way they would commit to any targets until after the US had delivered - “After You, Sir”.
Despite hard efforts from Europe to appeal to Transatlantic cooperation, the Europeans frustrated watched the US dodge their responsibility. And the gap only became even more visible, when Europe tried to impose a levy on international aviation, where China and the US fought hand in hand to block what most people today can see would make a lot of sense.
Then change came. Towards the end of the second Obama mandate the White House finally engaged in high level bilateral talks with China resulting in an agreement of what these two big emitters both were willing to commit to. Thus the road to Paris had been paved, and in 2015 the world got the long overdue international climate agreement.
Finally, US and Europe were again on the same climate page. But then came Trump - and withdrew US from the Paris agreement. Only when 4 years later President Biden on his very first day in the White House decided that the US should re-enter the Paris agreement, the Transatlantic climate bond was again re-established and reinforced. Since then the transatlantic dialogue has been solid, and a lot of climate initiatives and policies to fast forward the green transition have been taken on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe with NextGen Europe, the huge Recovery programme after Covid targeting the green transition, a strengthening of the ETS, and a number of regulatory work on EV’s, buildings, energy efficiency etc. And in the US at the federal level not the least with IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act. The purpose and direction may be the same. However, instead of working together on the global price on carbon that most if not all Economists would recommend, US chose to introduce a huge scheme of more than $700 bl. of primarily economic carrots rewarding green innovation taking place in the US, whereas Europe for almost 20 years has had a system of pricing carbon in line with the polluters pay principle. The different approaches could create potential trade issues, but it seems that the risk of a trade war over e.g. the European CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) has been defused through diplomatic work and a new EU industrial policy is being designed in order to be better aligned with the US way of doing things. Finally, it seems that both sides of the Atlantic now are working on delivering on the set climate targets.
Now as the security establishment realises that climate change is a threat multiplier and thus must be taken into consideration when it comes to security policy and risk modelling it is time to update the raison d’etre for the transatlantic cooperation. At its Madrid Summit in 2022 NATO included climate in its new strategic concept, and on both sides of the Atlantic climate seems to be integrated stronger in strategic security and defense planning.
To revitalise and update the security thinking now also with the security implications of accelerated climate change would be a both worthy and pressing new strategic priority for a transatlantic cooperation that wants to stay relevant - also in the eyes of new generations on both sides of the Atlantic.