The EU’s Climate No Change

By Andrew Stuttaford

Monday, June 01, 2026

 

In a new article on the site, John Gustavsson discusses the EU’s reluctance to back down from its green new deal. As he notes, despite the harm that its climate policies have inflicted and is inflicting on the bloc’s economy, Brussels has not taken advantage of various potential off-ramps (for example in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine) that would have provided an excellent face-saving excuse for a change in direction.

 

To be fair, Brussels has acknowledged economic reality more than is sometimes realized. These have included its acceptance (with caveats) of nuclear energy as green, agreeing to interim delays in the pace of decarbonization, and concessions to the agricultural sector. Next up may be more flexibility with regard to the timing of the EV mandate. Good, good, but like Brussels’s other concessions this will be too little, too late.

 

The broader project rolls on. As Gustavsson explains, there are good reasons why:

 

Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.

 

Indeed not. And if a policy leads to a crisis, Brussels does not necessarily see that as bad. As Jean Monnet, the EU’s most important founding father, declared, “Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.”

 

He was right. Monnet knew that there was little or no popular support for the march to a federal or confederal Europe, and he expected national politicians to reflect that attitude, partly out of self-interest. Why, with the exception of those who dreamt of some grander European role, would they want to hand over their power to Brussels? A crisis, however, might be “beneficial” by “forcing” such leaders to bend the knee. And so, from the near meltdown of the eurozone to Covid, it has proved. The answer to many of the woes that the EU has inflicted upon the continent has a way of being “more Europe.” Give that arsonist another match!

 

The essence of “ever closer union” is its direction. There can be pauses along the way, but the process of integration can never be allowed to go into reverse. With the exception of Brexit (and, arguably, an earlier compromise stitched up after a massive row with Charles de Gaulle) it never has. Once a “competence” has passed from the national to the EU level, it isn’t handed back.

 

Gustavsson rightly notes that the EU’s climatism is proving increasingly unpopular (“on paper, most voters did support the idea of climate transition. But supporting an idea is different from actually paying the price.”). That unpopularity will only increase as the damage inflicted by the new deal increases. As for the new “green” jobs that the transition was supposed to produce, they have mainly ended up in China.

 

Gustavsson:

 

China has ascended as a dominating force in green industries like solar panels and — worse for the EU — batteries and electric vehicles. Automobile exports are now dropping fast. From 2008 to 2023, over 2.3 million European manufacturing jobs were lost, compared to “only” around 800,000 in the United States during that time period.

 

So where does this end up? Gustavsson foresees a moment that the EU’s leadership will be forced to admit that the bloc has gone down the wrong path. I’m not so convinced. The political damage to “the project” that would ensue from such a confession could be enormous, a factor to which Gustavsson alludes.

 

If I had to guess, Brussels will press on with the main thrust of its climate policy while making further tactical adjustments along the way. More important, I suspect that it will, as has been the case in other areas (above all, perhaps when it comes to fiscal discipline), tacitly accept far more backsliding than it will admit aloud.

 

Will that be enough to stave off a political and economic crisis? Quite possibly not. And there is no guarantee that such a crisis will be “beneficial” — at least as Brussels interprets that term.