Eu unveils clean industrial deal, mobilizes 100 billion

Bruxelles – Europe is shedding its role as an inflexible regulator and choosing the path of simplification: "without Elon Musk's chainsaw" and "without changing its climate objectives" but "listening" to the protagonists of industry and business.

The long-awaited Clean Industrial Deal by Ursula von der Leyen's executive has seen the light - accompanied by an omnibus package to streamline bureaucracy and a plan to lower energy bills - confirming the anticipations: fewer environmental constraints for businesses, rules to facilitate state aid and the Buy European option are the weapons to relaunch European competitiveness crushed by the United States and China: "We want to cut the bureaucratic ties that hold you back", assured the German leader, addressing directly industrial representatives gathered in Antwerp, bringing with her the promise of a continent "of innovation and industrial production".

Ambition is not lacking but funding is scarce. The EU Energy Commissioner, Dan Jorgensen, uses irony to ensure that the European Commission will swear by the Draghi report as elsewhere by the Bible, but the former Prime Minister's line on the need for new funds to avoid falling into "a slow agony" seems unfulfilled.

The plan calls for mobilizing 100 billion euros, a figure far from the needs estimated by the former number one of the Eurotower. And in reality, there is little fresh money to be seen: only an additional billion euros of guarantees within the current multiannual financial framework and the promise to launch a Decarbonization Bank to leverage to mobilize the sum over the next 10 years: "The transformation towards green will make our industry great: not 'great again', but even greater than in the past", assured von der Leyen's deputy with responsibility for clean transition, Teresa Ribera, responding days later to Donald Trump's broadsides according to which the Green Deal "is a scam".

But while on the one hand Brussels confirms its decarbonization agenda, on the other it gives a push to its maxi-text symbol of the first von der Leyen legislature, lightening the regulatory burden on companies' shoulders.

Taxonomy, carbon tax at borders, rules on corporate sustainability and reporting obligations: these are the four legislative pieces that Brussels - under pressure from industry and the EPP of the German leader herself - now proposes to streamline in what will only be the first of a long series of simplification packages that will arrive in the coming months: "Simplification does not mean deregulation: we are not changing our Green Deal targets, which remain where they are", Ribera and the EU Commissioner for Economy, Valdis Dombrovskis, have repeatedly stressed, presenting the bureaucratic guillotine aimed at reducing administrative burdens for SMEs by 35% by 2029, with an estimated saving of 6.3 billion euros.

Reviving industrial competitiveness also involves lower energy costs for businesses, to which Brussels has dedicated an ad hoc plan less than a year after its electricity market reform came into force. While waiting for a recommendation to governments to cut energy taxes and a consumer incentive scheme to avoid peaks in demand during the most expensive hours, the Berlaymont Palace estimates that the integration of these measures will lead to an "estimated overall saving of 45 billion euros in 2025, which will progressively increase to 260 billion euros by 2040".

And in the meantime, it firmly rejects the idea of going back on the cap on gas prices, as requested by Italy and other capitals. "It is the market that decides prices", Jorgensen made clear, promising a roadmap to free the EU from Russian fossil fuels within a month. And there is no backtracking on the Kremlin's gas ban either, not even after a possible peace agreement with Ukraine.