Trump 2.0 will hurt planet, open door for America’s green rivals: EU climate chief

BRUSSELS — Donald Trump trashing United States climate efforts will empower rivals to control the industries of tomorrow, Europe’s top competition and climate official said Thursday.

“It is not good news that a big player such as the United States decides to go in a different direction,” Teresa Ribera said in an interview in her office in Brussels. “It is not good news for anyone. But … whenever there is a big player that decides to abandon a room, there will be other players entering.”

Ribera is in her third week as a European Commission executive vice president, one of just six helping run the European Union’s executive branch. Her portfolio only makes her more powerful. 

A veteran climate official, Ribera is in charge of delivering a “clean, just and competitive transition” away from the EU’s fossil fuel economy. She is also steering the EU’s mighty division that controls state aid and antitrust policy. On paper, that makes Ribera one of the most influential EU executives ever to sit in the Berlaymont.

With the high-profile role comes a momentous task: Crafting a response to China and America’s subsidy-fueled clean tech advances, which risk leaving Europe in the dust. Ribera and her boss, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, say the clean economy is Europe’s best chance to avoid permanent industrial decline.

Trump’s vision for America is the opposite. He has pledged to unleash fossil fuel production to lower energy costs and to walk away from President Joe Biden’s clean energy subsidy regime, which was designed to stimulate a clean industrial boom. 

Ribera warned that Europe should not go down the same route, pointing to lessons from the recent past where delaying the auto sector’s green transition allowed Chinese carmakers to swoop in and dominate the electric vehicle market.

“[For] a very long time, we heard the Western car industry thinking that they were so good in the internal combustion engine that they were always to be at the front row,” she said. “There were others that understood things differently. So we missed the train. And I think that this is what we need to avoid.”

Ribera welcomed competition from foreign companies who were providing cheap, clean goods and services — so long as there was a “level playing field.”

“I have no problems at all with great companies succeeding — wherever they come from — in producing things that help to decarbonize. I think that it is great. We need that to happen everywhere,” she said. “Even if there are others that have performed better than us.”

But the EU is already targeting what it views as unfair subsidies for Chinese electric cars and seeking to tax high-carbon imports from countries that do not price their greenhouse gas pollution.

Ribera also has a powerful new weapon to protect European companies: the Foreign Subsidies Regulation. The mechanism enables Ribera to block mergers or bar foreign companies from European public contracts — if the EU decides an overseas government is providing unfair help. 

Thus far, the EU has used the regulation to go after Gulf companies and Chinese firms. 

“In principle,” the regulation is a “great thing,” Ribera said, but it faces “practical difficulties” — primarily finding “sound evidence” that subsidies are actually market-distorting. 

Ribera wants to share intelligence with competition authorities in the U.S. and the United Kingdom to ensure that EU action is hitting the right targets.

Ribera only recently moved into her new office and met POLITICO in a room with a green midcentury sofa and chairs. Above the seats was a 1977 photograph of Margaret Thatcher, then Britain’s conservative opposition leader, sitting on those exact chairs. 

Entering the room, Ribera sat opposite the seat Thatcher took almost a half-century ago.

Ideologically, Ribera, a Spanish socialist, also sits opposite the free market-espousing, government-slashing Thatcher. Her last role was managing Spain’s clean energy transition for Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, where she brokered a deal with unions and companies to shut down Spain’s coal mining industry. 

Ribera said she was acutely aware of the social upheaval linked to the EU’s climate strategy. The EU must ensure Europeans are on board with the “speed of change” and “do not feel this is a threat,” she insisted.

“How we can provide the means that they can come along with this change is going to be very, very important,” Ribera said. “And I think that is one of the aspects that was not sufficiently taken into consideration in the past and that we need to reinforce.” 

Asked how she’d respond to EU politicians using Trump’s climate policy reversal as an excuse to slow down the green transition at home, Ribera argued that sticking with settled targets is in the European economy’s best interest. 

“Our businesses need stability,” she said. “I don’t think it is going to be appealing for anyone willing to invest their money if one day we say ‘yes,’ the other day we say ‘no,’ that we change the time frames or parameters … That doesn’t work for anyone.” 

That also involves setting a new, EU-wide 2040 climate goal so companies have certainty, she added. The Commission plans to propose legislation targeting a 90 percent cut in planet-warming emissions by that year. 

“If we understand that in order to create and update a new golden age for the industry in Europe, there are two main drivers, which are the green revolution and the digital revolution, we need to create the conditions for these revolutions to happen,” Ribera said. “This means identifying where we want to be.” 

That target, however, will come too late for the EU to meet the United Nations’ February deadline for submitting a new climate plan under the Paris Agreement, Ribera acknowledged — the first time a Commission official confirmed POLITICO’s reporting that the bloc would file its plan late. Last month, White House officials told POLITICO that the U.S. would likely release its plan before Trump takes office.

The EU needs to show it’s “complying with our own duties” by filing a plan, which will include a 2035 target, by the next global climate summit in November, Ribera said, but added that the bloc’s “complicated governance structure” stands in the way of a February submission. 

“I’m optimistic on the possibility to come up with this in due time,” she said, “even if it is not February.”

As for the Thatcher photo, she quipped that now that the U.K. Labour Party was renationalizing the railways that the Conservatives once privatized, perhaps she would also hang a photo of the current British prime minister.

“We’ll get Keir Starmer over there,” she said.