Changing green rules won’t help industry, EU climate chief says

BRUSSELS — Europe’s conservatives aren’t helping the economy with their constant demands for tweaks to the bloc’s green rulebook, the European Union’s climate chief told POLITICO.

Wopke Hoekstra’s main task in the new European Commission, which took office earlier this month, is to ensure the bloc’s climate ambitions go hand in hand with industrial revival. 

But that won’t entail weakening existing green legislation — on the contrary. To support its struggling industrial sectors, the EU must stick with the climate rules agreed in the last five years, he insisted. 

“Many companies are asking for predictability and staying the course rather than changing the rules of the game simply because they cannot cope,” he said in an interview on Monday afternoon. 

“One of the main criticisms of business is, stop changing course every half year,” he added. “Particularly heavy industry have very long investment cycles, sometimes decades ahead, and you are then not helped by politicians who are in the habit of constantly changing their minds.” 

Hoekstra swerved a question on whether that’s a criticism of his own political family, the center-right European People’s Party. 

Revising existing rules “is a temptation we should resist more generally,” he said. “As a general rule, politicians are much more prone to buyer’s remorse than businesspeople.” 

But the loudest calls for changing to the EU’s climate legislation over the past year have come from the EPP. Its leader Manfred Weber has campaigned to scrap the bloc’s phaseout of combustion engine cars, calling the law passed last year a “mistake.” Last month, the group sought to weaken the bloc’s anti-deforestation law. 

The EPP, unlike Hoekstra, has also been reluctant to give its full-throated support to the EU’s next climate milestone. Earlier this year, the Commission recommended the bloc cut planet-warming emissions by 90 percent by 2040 in order to reach net zero by 2050, but has yet to make a formal legislative proposal. 

Hoekstra didn’t give a clear answer when asked whether the 2040 target should form part of the Clean Industrial Deal, the Commission’s green industrial strategy expected on Feb. 26. 

But he heavily hinted that his preference is to include it in the package — precisely because of industry demands for predictability. 

“That is something we still need to internally decide on,” he said of the timing for the target. “But I think there is a logic to making sure you combine the various elements and give forward guidance on the business side and the climate side. Ideally, this is something where the forward guidance should be combined.”

Once the target is settled — Hoekstra reiterated that it should be “90 percent, not more, not less” — the EU should start discussing the “prerequisites” to meet it, he added. 

“How do we make that transition one where Europe is becoming more rather than less competitive? How do we make sure that the social dimension is more important than it is today? How do we make sure that we take others across the globe with us?” he said. 

“That is the conversation we should have,” he added. “These elements will make or break our success, not the exact percentage.” EU countries will discuss the 2040 target at next week’s gathering of environment ministers. Hungary, which chairs the meeting, has asked ministers to contemplate exactly these prerequisites — but also what elements of the existing climate rulebook could be “simplified or streamlined.”