BRUSSELS, February 26, 2025 — Today, the European Commission unveiled the Clean Industrial Deal, a controversial strategy intended to support struggling European industries while supposedly cleaning them up to make them fit for the green transition.
Responding to calls from the industrial sector, particularly energy-intensive industries such as petrochemicals, the Clean Industrial Deal includes a series of initiatives, both legislative and nonlegislative, organized around six pillars. These pillars address issues such as energy prices, workforce challenges, obstacles to circularity, and trade. With its commitment to mobilize 100 billion euros for short-term relief, the plan risks further pouring already scarce financial resources into unreliable technologies such as carbon capture and storage that ultimately provide a lifeline for a fossil fuel economy.
Silvia Pastorelli, CIEL’s EU Petrochemicals Campaigner, issued the following statement:
“Behind the ‘clean technologies’ wording, the Clean Industrial Deal hides ineffective and costly techno-fixes such as carbon capture and storage and increased support for ‘low carbon’ hydrogen. These measures risk justifying the expansion of new fossil fuel infrastructure and jeopardizing the energy transition.
The text fails to address the urgent need to prioritize energy and demand reduction, particularly in the petrochemical industry — one of the most energy-intensive sectors and a major driver of fossil fuel consumption.
The European Commission’s Clean Industrial Deal risks echoing Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ mentality with a misguided ‘produce, baby, produce’ approach. This Deal should be the EU’s opportunity to strategically support industries central to the green transition while managing the phasedown of declining sectors such as petrochemicals and plastics. Instead, the European Commission seems to be ignoring urgent climate and pollution warnings, crafting plans that neither serve the workers they claim to champion nor propel Europe toward a toxic-free, climate-safe future.”
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Media Contact
Rossella Recupero, Communications Campaign Specialist: [email protected]
Notes to Editors:
- The Clean Industrial Deal announces more concrete proposals to come in the next months, including a Chemical Industry package, which will include initiatives to support production in Europe, and the so-called, “ Industrial Decarbonisation Accelerator Act”, which should speed up permitting and will include a voluntary label on the carbon intensity content of industrial products.
- Today, the EU Commission also presented the Affordable Energy Action Plan that aims to lower energy bills for households and industries and strengthen the Energy Union. However, many civil society organizations have criticized this plan for its proposal to fund additional liquified natural gas (LNG) infrastructure outside the EU’s borders and sign longer term LNG contracts.
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