Climate change ranks high on the policy agenda of the European Union (EU) which considers itself as a leading force in the battle against global warming. The EU is committed to the objective of limiting the rise in global average temperature to no more than 2° Celsius above pre-industrial levels in order to hedge against dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. In this paper, we provide a critical appraisal of EU climate policy over the last two decades. Given the global public good properties of climate protection we derive guidelines for sound unilateral action and evaluate contemporary EU climate policy against these guidelines. We find that ? while the EU must be praised for pushing international agreements and going ahead with ambitious emission reduction targets ? the implementation of EU climate policies is likely to make climate protection much more costly than necessary.