Ready legal action if passes the gas in green taxonomy
(Sustainabilityenvironment.com) – If the European Parliament says yes to gas in green taxonomy, we are ready to drag the Commission to court. This was announced by some MEPs on the eve of the important vote on the regulation for investments considered sustainable and facilitated, scheduled for this week. MEPs like Sirpa Pietikainen or Paul Tang, two of the negotiators.
If the green taxonomy receives the green light “Parliament will surely try to go to court… We will argue that it goes against primary legislation and we will definitely fight for it“, Tang explained to Reuters, referring to the supreme sources of European law including the founding treaties. “If this were to happen, I would be in favour of legal action and I would be part of the group of MEPs that takes the matter to court,” Pietikainen echoes.
Tang is part of that transversal majority born in early June to oppose the gas in green taxonomy and the role reserved by the nuclear regulation. A majority that has proselytized between social democrats and popular, liberals of Renew and the more discounted Greens and Left.
And it achieved a first result: with 76 yes, 62 no and 4 abstentions, on 14 June the Environment and Economy Committees of the EU Parliament adopted a resolution calling for the removal of gas and atom from the list of investments considered sustainable. A clear indication for the vote in plenary, which is held in these hours before the day before the debate.
Read also Green taxonomy: gas investments in London are sustainable
After months of heated controversy, last February the Commission produced the second delegated act, that part of green taxonomy relating to gas and nuclear power. Both energy sources are included, with certain parameters, in the list of EU green investments alongside solar, wind. A text that is the result of the compromise between France (yes to nuclear, no to gas) and Germany (yes to gas, no to nuclear).
But what is taxonomy for Europe? The definition of taxonomy is a real classification of what investments are deemed to be environmentally sustainable in Europe. To achieve the objectives of the European Green Deal, the EU needs not only public but also private funds. This is why taxonomy was born: in order to tell investors what is green and what is not.
The new global energy situation that emerged after the Russian invasion of Ukraine weighs heavily on the European Parliament’s vote. For those opposed to green taxonomy in this form, “this delegated act arrived before the war in Ukraine”, and in light of Europe’s dependence on Moscow “now makes even less sense than before”, Christophe Hansen explained to the press in early June, the rapporteur of the measure in quota PPE. “Politically we cannot agree to finance a war machine even more than we are already doing, unfortunately”.