The next EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) meeting will be held on 5 December, and the dispute over the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will not be resolved by then, according to the European Commission.
The European Commission briefed the Member States’ ambassadors to the EU (Coreper) on the work of the IRA task force (see EUROPE 13051/26) on Wednesday 23 November. Three meetings in this format have already taken place, but have not resulted in any concrete progress, two European sources said.
Unlike the EU, the US does not seem to be in a hurry to find a solution that will meet European demands. They are even suggesting that the EU should go ahead and propose its own system of support for green technology producers.
Such an idea seems increasingly plausible to some Member States, who want to avoid an exodus of European companies to the US.
“We need to put all the options on the table and find a credible solution so that a company can decide where to produce, without any discriminatory subsidies distorting that choice”, explained a source at the French Ministry of Europe.
The negotiated solution with the Americans remains the priority for the European Commission and the Member States, but it should not be determined in fifteen years’ time, as is the case for other disputes with the United States, according to this French source.
In a draft of the joint statement to be adopted after the 5 December TTC Council meeting, which EUROPE has seen, a parallel is drawn between the work of the IRA task force and the Transatlantic Sustainable Trade Initiative they will launch on 5 December (see EUROPE 13067/23).
The new initiative should “give additional focus and enhance the ongoing collaboration across the TTC that strives to support the transition to low carbon economies and the U.S-E.U Task Force on the Inflation Reduction Act” according to the document dated 18 November.
This paragraph, all the while remaining in square brackets, also refers to the “promotion of coherence in approaches to green public procurement”. (Original version in French by Léa Marchal)