EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra thinks reports of the death of Europe’s green agenda have been greatly exaggerated.

“There’s always a lot of talk about backlash,” Hoekstra told POLITICO’s Sustainable Future Summit Tuesday. “That is, I think, one of the big misconceptions.”

The EU’s new climate goal for 2040, agreed by ministers last month, “is actually an acceleration, rather than a downgrade, of what we are having today,” he said.

The EU’s approach to its environmental and climate rules has been placed under extreme pressure from a combined pushback from far right parties, heavy industry and some leading members of Hoekstra’s own center right European People’s Party.

That has led to the scrapping or weakening of some existing standards and made setting the 2040 target a brutal political fight.

But Hoekstra said the realignment of some green policies was not about resiling from Europe’s environmental ambitions.

“We’ll need to find a recipe — and I’ve been saying that over and over again — where we really make sure that climate, competitiveness and independence are being brought together. That in the end, is the winning formula,” he said.

Hoekstra also pushed back on criticism by countries whose exports will be hit by the EU’s carbon border tax. This was a major feature of the recent COP30 climate negotiations, with large emerging economies like South Africa, India and China expressing concern about a measure they believe unfairly disadvantages their industries.

Hoekstra dismissed that griping as a way to gain advantage in the course of the COP30 talks.

“It is a tool that is being used, as quite often is the case in diplomacy,” he said.

What he had heard “behind-closed-doors,” he said, was a completely different story.

“Those who might have expressed their concerns publicly are not only acknowledging inside of a room that actually the effects are not that large, they’re actually even saying that it helps them to have a different type of conversation,” he said.