The European Union (EU) has been a longstanding champion in global climate politics. For much of the past 20 years, Europeans saw the EU’s leadership on climate change as a key plank of its external relations and, to some extent, a source of its normative or soft power. Backed by domestic environmental and competitiveness agendas within many member states, the EU’s advocacy has been critical in pushing climate change up the global public policy agenda. At the EU level, the adoption of the Energy and Climate Package in 2008 marked the alignment of the energy security and the global decarbonisation agendas.