Good morning.
A growing number of European capitals are turning against the EU’s most powerful and effective climate policy.
Italian minister for enterprise Adolfo Urso said ahead of a Brussels council meeting on Thursday that “all were aware” that the Emission Trading System (ETS) mechanism needed a “radical revision.”
He also called for the system to be “suspended, pending reform.”
Urso was one of the signatories of a joint letter circulated a day earlier, signed by 13 countries calling for the ETS to be revised to “support competitiveness.”
Germany’s Katherina Reiche, who spearheaded the letter, said that the ETS benchmarks “are impossible to meet” and “will drive the chemical industry out of the country. We cannot allow that.”
The bloc’s ETS charges companies for their carbon emissions. Under current plans, the supply of free pollution permits ends by 2034. The idea of the 2005 scheme is to gradually increase the cost of polluting products while making greener products more attractive. Tata Steel’s sustainability chief recently warned the Dutch prime minister that revising the system now would “put pressure” on companies that have already invested in sustainability.
But Cefic, Europe’s powerful chemical lobby, has campaigned relentlessly to weaken the system.
EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen and climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra offered a full-throated defence of the system at the recent leaders retreat in Antwerp, but national capitals increasingly are listening.
Sweden’s deputy prime minister, Ebba Busch, however offered a different view: polluting companies “had years to make necessary changes, but they decided not to and now they want the EU to come save them,” she said. “Well, that’s just lazy.”
The commission plans to put forward the ETS revision in the third quarter of this year.
Wester van Gaal, economy editor
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