EU’s Burdensome Green Deal Has Some in France, Germany Seeing Red

There is a famous one-word line in Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” wherein our bourgeois heroine Emma has just about had it with her doctor husband Charles’s stultifying ways: “Enough,” she gasps, in French. That exasperation seems to encapsulate the new prevailing sentiment in France and Germany as the two countries push back against the European Union’s so-called Green Deal. The lofty goals of that deal, which include zero net emissions of greenhouse gasses by 2050 and economic growth completely decoupled from resource use. Also, the European Commission is aggressively seeking to engineer the EU’s current energy, transportation, and taxation policies with a view to curtailing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030. The pressure from Brussels is not going down well at Paris and Berlin. Earlier this month President Macron literally called for the EU to hit the “pause” button on its increasingly oppressive tangle of environmental regulations. Speaking at a meeting to promote a new “green industry” bill at the Elysée Palace, he said, “We have already passed a lot of regulations at the European level, more than our neighbors.… Now we have to execute, not make new rule changes, because otherwise we will lose all the players.”“We don’t just want to be a green market, we also want to produce green on our soil,” Mr. Macron told a group of ministers, business leaders, and trade union representatives. More telling than what he said was where he said it — in the heart of Paris, not Brussels. As France grapples with inflation and a rising cost of living, and with Mr. Macron slowly emerging from a nadir of popularity following his much-loathed pension reform, he is prioritizing protecting French workers over keeping Brussels bureaucrats happy. Now is the time to court new investments, not jeopardize existing ones.In Germany, there is also growing discontent with the EU’s top-heavy green dictates. After months of political infighting over climate legislation, the country’s three ruling parties, the socialist SPD, the Greens, and the liberal FDP, came to an uneasy compromise over a ban on new gas boilers that threatened to unravel a landmark climate protection law passed in 2019 because parts of it had to be scrapped. By 2030, at least in theory, Germany wants to cut its emissions by 65 percent relative to 1990 levels before achieving so-called climate neutrality by 2045.The political squabbling over how to put some of those aims into practice dovetails with a majority of Germans doubting that the government will achieve its climate targets, let alone those set by Brussels. For one thing, there is no getting around the shortfall in tax revenue that imperils the future subsidization of a full pivot to renewable energy. The bickering picked up again this week as members of the three-party ruling coalition fought over new legislation concerning home heating. If passed, it would mandate that starting in 2024, newly installed heating systems will have to run 65 percent on renewable energy. But the heat pumps required for that cost more than $20,000 more than a standard boiler. Disagreements over the bill are such that they threaten to splinter the coalition, which includes the Social Democrat party of Chancellor Scholz. Blows have been traded via Twitter, where the Greens lashed out at the FDP for what they say is unacceptable on formally submitting the bill to the Bundestag. The Social Democrat whip, Matthias Miersch, said on social media, “People are increasingly fed up with the bickering over heating and want clarity.”It is now very unlikely that any such clarity will come in the form of new legislation before the summer. By some leading indicators Germany’s economy is now in recession. The country’s main statistics office released data released Thursday that showed Germany’s GDP dropped by 0.3 percent in the period between January and March. That isn’t much, but it followed a drop of 0.5 percent during the final quarter of 2022. By most definitions two consecutive quarters of contraction means a recession. That is not good news for Europe’s biggest economy, nor for the health of the European project as a whole. Tiring too are the weeks of acrimony over such a simple thing as how to keep one’s house warm in winter. Genug, Madame Bovary might say — if she were German.

EU’s Burdensome Green Deal Has Some in France, Germany Seeing Red

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