The EU’s answer to climate populism - Stringent and appropriate?

Perhaps more than any other policy today, climate mitigation has become the focal point of European Union politics. According to the European Green Deal, the Commission’s latest set of policies in the area of climate policy, every EU law and regulation is to be reviewed in order to align them with the objective of climate protection. Moreover, significant sums of financial support are being made available to achieve progress towards a novel kind of economy based on resource-saving and environmentally sound practices rather than the use of ever more resources and pollution. Populism is ranking high amongst those factors that counteract this high-level project of ecological modernization. While the phenomenon of populism tends to escape a clear definition, many observers have ascertained the importance of climate policy in populist discourse. In that regard, populism is usually assumed to cover a spectrum of positions roughly between the outright denial of climate change, and skepticism towards the technological changes involved with the pursuit of higher levels of sustainability. By means of policy analysis, this paper assesses the EU’s answer to that challenge, and discusses whether populist discourse and actors have influenced the policy outcomes.