One year after the presentation of the Clean Industrial Deal, the central question is no longer whether Europe needs an industrial transformation but whether it is prepared to deliver it at the scale and pace required.
The message of Professor Mario Draghi’s report, The future of European competitiveness, was clear: Europe’s competitiveness challenge cannot be solved through marginal adjustments, piecemeal reforms or deregulation. It requires massive investment, coordinated industrial policy and a clear strategic direction at the EU level.
Efforts to respond to current challenges through calls for regulatory rollback risk undermining the investment certainty that Europe urgently requires. As a broad range of industrial actors have underscored, a predictable policy framework for carbon pricing, with a strong and stable carbon price at its core, is crucial in unlocking long-term investment and safeguarding Europe’s industrial transformation. The recent attacks on carbon pricing are driven by a narrow group of actors with vested interests rather than reflecting the breadth of Europe’s industrial ecosystem.
Europe’s industry is under real pressure, from energy price volatility, global overcapacity and ageing assets. But deregulation is not an industrial strategy. The real risk today is not carbon leakage, but decarbonisation leakage: losing clean industrial investment to regions moving faster and more decisively.
Industrial policy must therefore provide clarity in the direction of travel. Europe’s long-term competitiveness depends on reducing structural dependencies on fossil fuels and imported raw materials, scaling circular production models and accelerating electrification.
Climate neutrality is not a constraint on industrial resilience – it is its foundation.
CAN Europe letter to the Competitiveness Council
One year after the presentation of the Clean Industrial Deal, the central question is no longer whether Europe needs an industrial transformation but whether it is prepared to deliver it at the scale and pace required.
