BRUSSELS — For six years, the EUs efforts to fight climate change have been on an upward swing. That came to an end on Wednesday in messy, exhausted scenes.
After a marathon meeting that ran through Tuesday night and eventually ended a little after 9 a.m. the next morning, a majority of the bloc’s 27 governments agreed on new targets to cut pollution — but only by weakening existing laws and slowing domestic efforts designed to cut down on that very same pollution.
The compromise was met with relief by many countries and European Commission officials, who had feared an embarrassing collapse that would have hamstrung the EU on the eve of the COP30 U.N. climate talks in Brazil starting Thursday.
But it also underscored a swing in political momentum. After half a decade of green victories on climate policy, a much more skeptical group of countries and parties now has the upper hand.
