Europe’s Green Deal addresses climate change, but does it reach Pope Francis’ vision of ‘integral ecology’?

By Bridget Ryder
America: The Jesuit Review
August 10, 2023

The European Union has the ambitious aim of making Europe “the world’s first climate-neutral continent.” The slogan underpins theEuropean Green Deal, a wide-ranging series of new regulations and laws that analysts say is the world’s most ambitious political plan to respond to climate change. The goal, according to the Green Deal strategy statement, is no less than zero “net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050,” “economic growth decoupled from resource use” and “no person and no place left behind.”

Introduced in 2019 by the E.U. Commission—a body of officials that serves as a kind of executive branch and bureaucracy to help the treaty-based union of European countries function—the Green Deal amends the European Union’s climate, energy, transport and taxation policies with the short term goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030.

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