Green economy, no EU leadership. “It entered later in the clean-tech race.”

Brussels –The European Union, which would like to be a leader in sustainable change, has never been a leader and risks never being one as it lags, grappling with new issues that affect the scope of political action and its ability to translate declared and unspoken ambitions into practice. In an analysis of the various challenges that cloak the eurozone, the European Parliament’s Center for Studies and Research speaks of the EU’s limits and highlights the original sins underlying a strategy that is certainly needed to combat global warming but seems to be no less obvious than declared.

The European Union launched the new course, the one devoted to green economy, in 2019. The announcement and the promise of the Green Deal allowed Ursula von der Leyen to be invested at the head of the current EU Commission: a belated commitment, in comparison. Looking at policies supporting clean tech, “Over the past 15 years, the Chinese government has massively subsidized green
industries, giving it a head start in key sectors (such as solar power) and in critical
raw materials (extraction and refining) which are essential for the environmental transition.”

The EU is a decade and a bit more behind. As if that were not enough, on the other side of the Atlantic, the EU Parliament study continues, “More recently, the United States has embarked on the so-called subsidy race, culminating in August 2022 with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which incentivizes domestic production in clean energy and technologies to reindustrialize the country, secure its energy supply and reduce its reliance on China.” Therefore, “by comparison, the EU entered the race later, not necessarily with lower funds, but more importantly with a less appropriate design for fueling green investments.”

It is possible that the project could not be strengthened or reversed because of the new security and defense spending requirements. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has prompted the EU to invest heavily in support for Kyiv and revive another kind of industry, defense, which risks diverting efforts and resources from what is needed for green transition to support new efforts in the industry and beyond. EU NATO States have not yet met the minimum commitment to spend 2 percent of GDP on security: now they need to combine their obligations under the Atlantic Alliance with the production of ammunition and artillery to counter the Russian advance in Ukraine. The EU, therefore, lags, and the leading role of sustainability seems even further away.