Two policy announcements on Friday will show whether the Commission can keep its emissions-cutting promises.
Zia Weise, Elena Giordano
The ETS reform proposal, in particular, will demonstrate whether Brussels can deliver on its promise to strengthen Europe’s flagging manufacturing industry while plotting a course to the EU’s legally binding net-zero target in 2050.
The electrification plan, meanwhile, will seek to tackle one of the greatest bottlenecks in the bloc’s energy transition — the switch from technologies that burn fossil fuels, such as combustion engines and gas boilers, to those that run directly on power, such as electric cars and heat pumps.
For both proposals, the Commission will lean heavily on the narrative that slashing fossil fuel use is good for the EU’s economy, reducing the bloc’s exposure to volatile import prices and driving domestic investments.
Climate, in rhetorical terms, is an afterthought: In a leaked draft of the electrification plan, the emissions impact was mentioned only once.
But how ambitious the two proposals are will determine whether the EU executive can keep the pollution-slashing promises it insists on remaining committed to despite the economic and political headwinds.
Only two days before its Friday announcements, the Commission held an event to commemorate the victims of climate disasters, coinciding with the fifth anniversary of the deadly floods that killed nearly 250 people in Germany, Belgium and neighboring countries.
