Frans Timmermans on the EU’s New Green Deal

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: what do you make of Greta Thunberg who said that, you know, she wrote a list of the things that people aren’t doing and the sort of, you know, sneaking around their commitments?

FRANS TIMMERMANS, EUROPEAN COMMISSION EXECUTIVE VP FOR THE EUROPEAN GREEN DEAL: Well, we are so lucky to have her. Isn’t it amazing that a 16-year-old young lady could get person of the year awarded by “Time” magazine? I’m really, really very excited about that. And she’s sending a very powerful message, and I think we should listen very carefully to what she says. That is why the green deal we are presenting is a road map to lead us to a climate neutral Europe by 2050. But to go there, we will have to take quite a number of measures, legal measures, to make it happen. And Greta can watch very carefully what we’re doing in the next months and years and see whether we can actually deliver what we promised. It is my firm belief that we can do that. We’ll need the support of all our member states and the European Parliament, but we can achieve this because we have massive support of more than 90 percent of the European population.

AMANPOUR: You do, and we saw in the last round of elections that climate was the top issue, way over immigration. We’ve seen in the United States in the midterms it was a major issue. And we see young people all over the world stepping out and doing their bit. But I guess, how much more difficult will it be for you to start with this Green New Deal? You’re talking about carbon neutral by 2050. I don’t know how doable that is. But if already countries are not even, you know, close to their targets that they promised in 2015, how realistic is this?

TIMMERMANS: Well, if people don’t understand that we need to make a paradigm shift, that we really need to transform our economies and our societies to face this challenge, if people don’t understand that, we won’t get there. But there’s an increasing understanding in society, also in business, that this is something we need to do. And that’s why we presenting this road map, which would give us the tools to get there, in transport, in our energy, in agriculture, in housing, in all these areas where we need to reduce our emissions and where we can create a huge amount of new jobs if we reset our economy on a circular basis.