While EU Member States have long made a commitment to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, the majority of them do not plan to do so, but worse, the United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, Poland and Slovenia plan to introduce new subsidies by 2030, according to an analysis of the 28 Member States' integrated National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) published by NGOs on Monday 9 September.
The study, carried out by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Friends of the Earth Netherlands (FoE) and Climate Action Network Europe (CAN Europe), points out that Greece, for example, intends to introduce a subsidy to encourage the replacement of diesel boilers with gas-fired ones, while Poland intends to provide subsidies for underground gas storage and the use of liquefied natural gas for transport.
Not one Member State has so far made a comprehensive report on its subsidies. Six countries - Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom - claim that there are no subsidies for fossil fuels in their countries, while the Commission has already found that all EU countries continue to subsidise oil, gas or coal - led by the United Kingdom, with €12 billion per year in subsidies in the form of tax breaks and budget transfers.
NGOs invite each Member State to list all existing fossil fuel subsidies using a common definition and to provide comprehensive phase-out plans in their final NECPs.
"As part of the G20, EU governments committed in 2009 to end fossil fuel subsidies. Ten years later, as the world is in the midst of a climate crisis, EU governments continue to provide huge sums of taxpayers’ money to fossil fuels, the single biggest cause of climate change", says Laurie van der Burg, a researcher at FoE Netherlands. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)