Good morning,
Today, MEPs will vote and very likely approve to delay green reporting rules.
The ECB's green chief Frank Elderson recently warned against cutting green rules, and told bankers at a conference in London that lax oversight had resulted in the great financial crisis (see transcript).
“Insufficient regulation and ‘light touch’ supervision could well fuel another crisis,” he warned.
Wise words, but likely not listened to in Brussels where the rightwing European People’s Party (EPP) has shown itself eager to work with the far right to dismantle green legislation, arguing they are expensive and uncompetitive.
Only a short while ago, green reporting rules were the centrepiece of the European Green Deal, and a defining feature of commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s first-term legacy.
Had she left them intact, they would have made her one of the most impactful commission presidents in EU history. But she now seems resigned to spending much of the next five years dismantling what she built in the previous five. “We’ll have wasted a decade,” Green MEP Bas Eickhout previously told me.
It's not clear how far the green rollback will go. The omnibus ‘simplification’ package (as green reporting rollback is called) is only the first part. The EU is also looking at weakening the 2040 climate targets — not by scrapping the 90 percent emissions reduction goal, but by rewriting the accounting rules.
And yesterday, EUobserver revealed that the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group had definitively secured enough signatures to launch a formal inquiry committee into EU funding for green NGOs. The move still needs to be confirmed by the parliament's conference of presidents in April, but one spokesperson said it can be seen as part of a "wider assault on the green deal," with backing from the EPP.
Which brings us back to the green reporting standards. While today’s delay is almost certain to pass, the push to weaken some of the rules could still face resistance in the negotiations ahead.
As Elderson told the bankers in London: “Framing financial stability and competitiveness as opposing forces is a fundamental misconception.”
- Wester van Gaal, green economy journalist
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