BRUSSELS — The European Union executive on Wednesday announced plans for a major revamp of its economic strategy to meet demands of the bloc’s captains of industry who have long complained about excessive taxation, sky high energy prices and an overbearing bureaucracy that makes the bloc unattractive.
At the same time, environmental groups say that far-reaching deregulation and the boosting of conditions for energy-intensive companies will come at the cost to the EU’s ambitious climate targets.
EU Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra called it “a game changer for Europe’s economy. It is a business plan to truly re-industrialize our European Union,” he said, calling it the reaction needed to reverse years of decline in the global marketplace.
“We’re all too aware that our slow economic growth, our dependencies and the fragmented market we still operate in are increasingly a problem, particularly against a backdrop of volatile geopolitics,” he said.
EU Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said that with the United States becoming a more uncertain ally by the week, the plan should be seen as a “call to action” to set EU industries free from excessive constraints and provide them with aid where necessary.
“Put simply, we cannot hope or expect to successfully compete in a perilous world with one hand tied behind our backs,” Dombrovskis said.
In the package of plans ranging from cutting red tape to containing energy prices, the executive commission came up with investments totaling hundreds of billions and savings totaling ten of billions of euros (dollars).
For example, Hoekstra said, plans include a “industrial decarbonization” bank, which could raise up to 100 billion euros in the next 10 years. “But then, if you leverage that, if you put private sector money next to that, you could easily add up to a number of 400 billion.”
The plans will now go to the EU parliament and the capitals of the 27 member states for further assessment before they can be turned into laws and regulations.
Environmental groups already rang the alarm, arguing the plans stand to profit especially fossil fuel intensive companies like steel plants and cement factories.
The European Environmental Bureau, which groups 180 nongovernmental organizations in 41 countries, said that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had effectively reneged on her 2019 European Green Deal, which was long seen as a global standard-bearer.
“The European Green Deal was hailed as a ‘man on the moon’ moment,” the EEB said in a statement. “Today, the narrative seems tailored primarily to energy-intensive industries and big corporations. But industrial policy should prioritise public interest, not just industry demands.”
