Brussels, 12 April 2024
ECR Rapporteur Johan Van Overtveldt has decided not to put a highly controversial parliament position on the revision of the Energy Taxation Directive (ETD) to a vote in the last meeting of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee next Thursday.
“It is clear that after all these years of negotiations there is still no clear majority for the compromises and I don’t want to jeopardise the fate of the file in the future,” said Van Overtveldt. “If voting means risking higher taxes and saying no to nuclear energy, then I would rather not vote at all. The EU’s competitiveness and the purchasing power of our citizens have already been compromised enough. It should be up to the next Parliament to decide the fate of this dossier,” he continued.
According to the ECR MEP, during the year-long negotiations, the Socialists and Greens refused to compromise on the transition period for the aviation and maritime sectors, as well as on the role and future of nuclear energy, despite the fact that the Parliament has expressed its support for nuclear energy in previous votes.
In the summer of 2021, the European Commission proposed its review of the Energy Taxation Directive (ETD), which has been in place since 2003. This Directive sets minimum levels of taxation for the use of energy products in the EU. A revision of the Directive should bring the text into line with the EU’s climate change objectives, for example by introducing a kerosene tax for intra-EU flights, a tariff ranking according to the carbon content of an energy product and taxation based on energy content rather than volume.
In Van Overtveldt’s draft, first published in 2022, he proposed a technology-neutral approach and sufficiently long transition periods. Nuclear energy was not included in the Commission’s proposal, but was included in Van Overtveldt’s text. “Reducing our carbon footprint through electrification, while keeping our energy supply stable and prices low enough for our businesses and citizens, won’t work without nuclear energy. It was therefore essential to have it in the text,” said Van Overtveldt.
Discussions on the dossier dragged on for years as negotiations were put on hold with the support of all political groups following Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the subsequent energy crisis in Europe. Van Overtveldt used this time to ask questions to the Commission, as it had failed to provide a global impact assessment of this file in relation to the other climate files: “We did not want to navigate blindly on new tax rules,” said Van Overtveldt.
It is now up to the new Parliament and the Council to find an agreement on the text. Although the Council has exclusive competence on taxation, a decision taken there could not enter into force without the Parliament’s opinion.