The Strasbourg vote on defunding green NGOs in May will be more than a classic far-right free speech chiller.
It certainly leans into the Trump playbook — hijacking public revulsion at the EU’s democratic deficit, and misdirecting it toward the smouldering embers of our checks and balances.
But the EPP’s wide-eyed finger-jabbing at €15m of (public) subsidies for NGOs also occludes the annual €1.7bn (private) lobby spend of corporates, which, in another, greener, world would be the real disgrace.
Bluntly, the EU Commission's public interest funding here amounts to just 0.001 percent of the financial firepower mobilised by the planet’s richest corporations to defend their planet-baking modus operandi.
Helping environmental groups to participate in legislative debate should be a vital counterweight to the business-as-usual which has driven us to the brink of climate chaos (especially in a system which denies elected MEPs the right to propose legislation).
But in our market-dominated democratic husk, the 'scandal' is that anything was paid to offset the corporate arsenal at all. Something rotten in the state of Brussels.
The EU has shelled out multiples of billions to polluting companies in clean energy transition subsidies, from green steel to blue hydrogen. En masse, firms have pocketed the cash, dished it out to shareholders, then cancelled or mothballed their green projects and asked for more handouts.
This socialisation of risk and privatisation of profit is a feature of our system, not a bug. Subsidies exist to increase capital accumulation, above concerns such as public health or the environment.
That is why Airbus is one of the top 10 recipients of green funds, even though 99.4 percent of the 700 commercial aircraft it delivered in 2023 ran on fossil fuels. It is why Europe’s top 25 greenhouse-gas emitters have trousered $87bn [€80.3bn] from EU-approved green investment funds.
It is also why EU citizens still cough up €42bn a year in subsidies for fossil-powered company cars alone. Three polluting carmakers – Stellantis, Toyota and Mercedes received €12bn in EU subsidies to go green yet their share of zero-emission vehicles varies only between two percent to 13 percent.
When the commission shells out €600m for electric vehicle battery research and plans pan-EU subsidies, the industry response, naturally, is to demand more money and less regulation to compete with the 'Chinese dragon.'
This too is telling.
China’s mass production of affordable clean cars involved an injection of $231bn in state funds since 2009. Their European counterparts, fresh from Dieselgate, bet against the need for urgent emissions-cutting technology.
Rather than cheer a state-funded model that might allow us to rapidly and fairly decarbonise our transport system, the EU instead slapped tariffs of up to 35 percent on Chinese EVs and is now likely to delay the phase-out of Europe’s fossil-powered cars.
As the famous New Yorker cartoon of a family huddled in a cave put it: “Yes, the planet got destroyed but for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.”
The pattern has played out time and again. A screeching of industry brakes halted the farm-to-fork strategy, the planned REACH chemicals reform, livestock emissions limits and much more.
Few eyebrows were raised last month when it emerged that almost two-thirds of the firms that advised the commission on how to dilute its corporate justice legislation had themselves been accused of human rights abuses and environmental destruction in the last decade.
This is how the EU now rolls. Defunding NGOs that monitor industry behaviour will at least ensure less evidence of corporate malfeasance next time around.
But most EU citizens want the green transition to be accelerated. Environmental NGOs — understaffed, underpaid and undervalued as they are — are the only actors fighting backs-to-the-wall campaigns, and punching above their weight, to make this happen.
A bonfire of their budgets, led by the same politicians that parrot industry talking points about red tape, administrative burden and competitiveness, would only help to cynically railroad the European Greenwash Deal taking shape before our eyes.
We may be shocked when the Amazon rainforest is trashed for a motorway to the next climate summit but this is the predictable outcome of a value system that places symbolic headlines, competitive prestige and corporate profitability above enforceable climate action.
A politics that affords capital accumulation the same import as a stable climate is doomed to fail when those two objectives conflict.
There are plenty of brilliant environmental scientists in Brussels, but they will not win policy debates with industry on their own. We, the public, need other actors on the stage who can help them in this fight because otherwise, the EU will kill its Green Deal simply because that is what its own logic impels it to do.
Arthur Neslen writes about the environment for the Guardian, Open Democracy, Equal Times and others. He was formerly the Guardian's European environment correspondent.
Arthur Neslen writes about the environment for the Guardian, Open Democracy, Equal Times and others. He was formerly the Guardian's European environment correspondent.