How Fighting Climate Change Gave the EU a New Reason to Exist

On her first day as head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen stood in front of world leaders at the UN climate conference in Madrid and promised to make Europe the world’s first carbon neutral continent within the next 30 years. “The European Green Deal is Europe's new growth strategy,” she said.

That made Paul Polman smile. A former chief executive of Unilever, Polman, 63, is part of a network of climate activists who in 2017 began lobbying the highest levels of European Union leadership to make climate change a major policy focus. “Momentum is building faster than we thought,” he said in an interview a few weeks after the conference. “We can still make these transformations work if we want to.”

In her speech, von der Leyen argued that the plan would not only position Europe at the forefront of the fight to limit global warming, it would also drive a new wave of economic development and help bind the continent together. She’s since described the proposal as a moonshot, but it’s considerably more than that. The EU would need to mobilize as much as 260 billion euros ($283 billion) annually over the next decade to build green infrastructure. That’s not an Apollo program—that’s one Apollo program per year, and it’s just part of what the Green Deal will entail.