Centrist and leftist MEPs on the Environment Committee (ENVI) accused those on the right of “unravelling the policies of the ‘European Green Deal” on Tuesday 24 June during an exchange with the European Commission on the evaluation of the National Energy and Climate Plans (see EUROPE 13658/8).
The backdrop was the recent announcement by the European Commission that it intended to withdraw the proposed directive on green claims – which was in the final stages of interinstitutional negotiation – before retracting it (see other news and see EUROPE 13665/11).
The centre-left of the Chamber is accusing the European Commission of having acted in this way to satisfy the demands of the EPP, ECR and PfE groups.
For Peter Liese (EPP, German), “one cannot say that criticising a specific piece of legislation is tantamount to attacking the ‘Green Deal’ as a whole”. “There has been a lot of duplication and bureaucracy, which is not needed to achieve the objective”, he explained.
In response, Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy (Renew Europe, Dutch) retorted that this was not the first time something like this had been tried, insisting that “there is no ‘Green Deal’ without a law on nature restoration, a law on deforestation, etc.”.
For Michael Bloss (Greens/EFA, German), there was no room for debate: the EPP’s behaviour was “an attack” on the whole of the ‘European Green Deal’, citing the pressure exerted by the Christian Democrat group on a series of other legislative texts relating to CO2 standards for cars, the energy performance of buildings and the ‘ETS2’ emissions trading system for trading greenhouse gas emission quotas. (Original version in French by Pauline Denys)