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Joe Biden’s European friends may be angry about his climate legislation.
But the US president’s America-first, subsidy-heavy approach has actually gained some reluctant — and unlikely for a Democrat — admirers on the continent: Europe’s conservatives.
Within the center-right European People’s Party, the largest coalition of parties in the European Parliament, officials are smart about why their own politicians are not taking a page from the Biden playbook.
Their frustration is homing in on European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – a staunch conservative the EPP helped install itself. Officials fear he has let von der Leyen lead the party away from his pro-industry, regulation-reducing ideals, according to interviews with key party figures.
Biden’s legislation has now brought his fury to the surface.
On Thursday, a wing of EPP lawmakers defected as parliament voted on whether to back von der Leyen’s planned response to Biden’s marquee green spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). His concern: It doesn’t go far enough in championing European industries.
Essentially, they want it to feel more like Biden’s plan.
EPP power broker and general secretary Thanasis Bakoulas said that the IRA was an “embarrassment” to Europe. The European Union “had all these well-funded policies available. And then Biden comes along with his IRA. And he introduces policies that are more efficient, more effective, more accessible to businesses and consumers.”
a bitter inspiration
European leaders were blindsided last summer when Biden signed the IRA into law.
Since then, they have complained loudly that US subsidies for indigenous clean technology threaten their own industries. But for the EPP, clearly unlike Biden’s Democrats, the legislation is also serving as bitter impetus.
“It’s a bit like a fairy tale, that someone in the crowd – and this time it wasn’t the boy, it was the American – was doing too much finger-pointing. [European] commission, and saying, ‘Oh, is the king naked?’ said Christian Ehler, a German European Parliament member from the EPP.
As part of the EU’s centerpiece climate policy, the European Green Deal, the European Commission, the EU’s policy-making executive arm, has stubbornly introduced law after law Polluters have to be squeezed from every angle, using tighter regulations or carbon pricing. The goal is to reduce the block’s net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.
Biden’s IRA serves the same goal in different ways. It’s loaded with voter- and industry-friendly tax breaks and Made-in-America requirements. Viewed from bureaucratic, free-trade Brussels, Biden’s climate policy looks more sleek, geopolitically muscular – and, especially for the EPP, indeed the best of anything coming out of the EPP-led commission. more attractive to voters than
For some, the sense of betrayal is directed inward, not at Washington.
“We’ve learned that we’ve lost track of the Green Deal part of the deal for the past two years,” said Ehler, who is using his seat on parliament’s powerful committee on industry, research and energy. Reduced climate burden on industry. “We’re in the middle of super regulation.”
The irony is that Biden and the Democrats might not have chosen this path if Republicans had not refused to move any form of climate regulation through Congress for decades.
The IRA was a product of political necessity, in line with independent-minded Democratic senators like Joe Manchin of coal-heavy West Virginia. If Biden and his party had their benders, Biden’s climate policy would look far more like the Brussels model.
let’s get political
As party boss, Bakolas is preparing the platform on which the EPP – a pan-European umbrella group of 81 centre-right parties – will campaign for the 2024 EU elections.
He is also tamper with With a coalition with the far right, that means the centre-right and centre-left consensus dominating climate policy in Brussels could break down. Bakola advocates a “more political approach”.
“We need to do the same [as the U.S.]With the same tenacity and determination,” he said.
One big problem: It’s hard for the EU, which doesn’t control tax policy, to match the political eye-popping offered of cashbacks for electric hammers (something Americans can now claim on their taxes). .
“Can this institutional arrangement in Europe, Brussels… function as smoothly and seamlessly as the US administration? No, because it is a difficult exercise for Europe to reach a decision… but it is an exercise that we need to do,” Bakolas said.
In other words, the EPP is looking to emulate Biden’s law — at least in spirit, if not legally.
Conservative thinking is beginning to coalesce around a few core themes: slowing down green regulation they feel burdens industry; using sector-specific programs to help companies reinvest their profits in cleaning up their businesses; And reducing red tape, they say, slows already clean industries from getting to work.
EPP MP Peter Liese said he was “desperately demanding” these measures to reduce red tape. He was glad to see something in Von der Leyen’s controversial IRA response plan. But Leece and EPP want more.
“We may have an answer to two crises, two challenges, that we have: the climate crisis and the challenge to our economy, including the IRA,” Liese said.
Green groups and left-wing MPs argue that the EPP is simply using the IRA and Europe’s wider economic crisis as a smokescreen to cover up a wider withdrawal from the Green Deal. In recent months the party has blocked, or threatened to block, several green regulations proposed by the commission.
“It’s like trying to put on your grandfather’s ballroom shoes and sprint 100m,” Green MEP Anna Cavazzini told parliament on Wednesday.
Bakolas rejected this.
He said the party had finally woken up to the need to establish a climate agenda that better reflected its own, centre-right, free-market ideals.
“What the IRA did,” he said, “is to raise alarm bells.”