The EU is headed for carbon neutrality. Well, most of it.European Union leaders agreed Thursday on a pledge to make the trading bloc carbon neutral by 2050. But the so-called "Green Deal" comes after several eastern European countries resisted the climate-conscious move, and makes an exception for coal-reliant Poland that activists aren't happy about,
BBC reports.World leaders — save for
President Trump — met over the last two weeks for the United Nations' COP25 climate conference in Madrid. And at the tail end of it, EU leaders meeting in
Brussels all agreed to embark on "on to an irreversible path to climate neutrality" by 2050, dedicating a 100 billion euro "Just Transition Mechanism" to help fossil-fuel-reliant countries make the switch. But even after previous holdouts Hungary and the Czech Republic agreed to the deal once addendums for nuclear power were added, Poland still wouldn't get onboard.Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Thursday that he'd gotten an exemption from the Green Deal because the country relies on coal for 80 percent of its energy needs, per The Guardian. While Morawiecki said he'd suggested the country could get to climate neutrality by 2070, the EU decided to press on without him and revisit the decision in June 2020. And to Neil Makaroff, European Policy Adviser for the international Climate Action Network, that's a "traumatic signal" that might leave less developed countries wondering why they should bother with climate action if the world's leading trading bloc can't come to an agreement, he tells The Verge.