A draft of the plan, published by the commission on Dec. 31, provoked a broad wave of criticism from some member nations, experts and lawmakers, who said that the consultation period was too brief and denounced the timing of the release during a holiday period. Compounding the confusion surrounding the new rules, the commission did not publish the final legislative act until one hour into a news conference on the topic.
The Platform on Sustainable Finance, a group of green finance experts which has been advising the commission, objected to the plan.
“The taxonomy was supposed create a steady flow of green investments,” said Henry Eviston from the Wild World Fund Europe’s office, which was part of the advisory group. “Instead, we are going to get a tsunami of greenwashing. It penalizes clean technologies, it will stifle innovation and direct billions of euros to investments in ‘business as usual.’”
And some investors and financial institutions may steer clear of the classifications. The head of the European Investment Bank, Werner Hoyer, said last week that the complexity of rules would make the investors “drowsy.”
The Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, an association of Europe’s asset managers and investors including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, said in an open letter that including natural gas undermined “the E.U.’s ambitions to set the international benchmark for credible, science-based standards for classifying sustainable economic activities.”
The regulation is not expected to be blocked by a sufficient number of national governments — under the bloc’s rules, at least 15 out of 27 member states, representing at least 65 percent of the E.U. population, would be necessary to stop it. But Austria and Luxembourg threatened legal action if nuclear power was labeled green. Austria, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands earlier this week urged the commission not to include any “fossil gas-based activities” as sustainable.
The plan is also set to face resistance in the European Parliament, although it remains unclear whether a majority of the body’s lawmakers would vote to block it.
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