BRUSSELS — Tax Big Oil, make Big Tech invest in renewables and protect Europe from climate disasters. Teresa Ribera’s post-summer policy wishlist isn’t short of ambitious ideas. In a 90-minute interview with POLITICO, the European Commission’s vice president for the green transition and competition policy discussed how she sees China, data centers, climate disaster funding, and more.
Some of her comments give a glimpse of the EU executive’s plans for the coming months, while others showcase Ribera’s own priorities. Climate change remains her top concern, and she returned throughout the interview to the recent heat waves, wildfires and drought that have ravaged Europe. Two years into the job, the former Spanish ecological transition minister has also embraced the competitive aspect of her dual role, with her next big challenge being how to approach a potential breakup of search giant Google.
Here are the five key takeaways from the interview. This summer has focused commissioners’ minds on the rising costs of climate change, said Ribera. Friday’s Commission meeting on fall priorities kicked off with a discussion on global warming, and the tone was “consistent” on needing to better protect Europe against the effects of climate change, she said.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen “is sincerely committed to climate action and worried about the climate dimension,” Ribera said. The Commission is working on a proposal to better protect Europe against climate disasters, but Ribera is thinking one step ahead. Once that plan is presented, she said, the EU needs to start thinking about how to pay for measures to climate-proof the continent.
Last week, she told POLITICO that the EU should consider a bigger common budget, more joint debt or a levy on the profits of fossil fuel companies to raise the money. In this week’s interview, she doubled down on the idea of a windfall tax. While she pointed to a proposal for a global levy from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, she also described a recent Spanish government proposal for a European fossil fuel tax as “interesting.” “I had a friend working in an oil company saying that … a well-managed oil company is the most profitable business.
A badly-managed oil company is the second-most profitable business,” she joked. And what we are already experiencing is that the impacts, the harms, the sorrow, the costs that are directly related to these profits are very high and are entirely socialized,” she added. I don’t know how far it can go.” Ribera also worries about the environmental and societal impacts of large data centers proliferating in the EU.
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