European speeches rarely excite. The EU's lawmaking process is incremental and disjointed, and the stakes are often obfuscated by detail and too many acronyms.
But when European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans, on December 13 2019, had to convince the European Parliament to approve the landmark Green Deal, Europe's overarching policy to become the world's first "climate-neutral bloc" by 2050, he brought out the big guns.
"We choose to go for climate neutrality in 2050 a...
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Wester is a journalist from the Netherlands with a focus on the green economy. He joined EUobserver in September 2021. Previously he was editor-in-chief of Vice, Motherboard, a science-based website, and climate economy journalist for The Correspondent.