Europe’s global plans all require money no one has
▻https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-global-plans-money-green-economy
“Europe is about to face a sort of impossible triangle,” said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels who specializes in energy and climate policy. “On the one hand, we want to accelerate the green transition and be competitive while doing that, on the other hand, we want to ramp up defense spending. And on the other hand, we want to be fiscally conservative.”
National envoys to Brussels are already wondering how much they can rob from the Green Deal to build up the bloc’s military.
“In a way defense and green deal will be competing interests for public money,” said a diplomat from an EU country, who — like others in this article — was granted anonymity in order to discuss politically sensitive issues.
A fund for “strategic technologies” — originally envisioned as a driver of clean tech innovation — was slashed from €10 billion to just €1.5 billion. And then EU leaders earmarked the remaining funds for defense spending anyway.
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France believes it has the answer.
Paris and other EU capitals are pushing to revive the so-called Capital Markets Union, a decade-old European Commission plan to use European’s savings to boost private investments across the bloc. The idea has struggled to gain acceptance, but keeps coming up.
“We will have a debate to have more public investment, but the idea is also to walk on two legs,” said an Elysée official, noting that private funding should increasingly be the secondary funding source for the EU’s green plans.