The EU plans to tax heating just when people are struggling to pay their bills

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By Professor Samuel Furfari, formerly a senior official at the Energy Directorate-General of the European Commission (1982-2018)  

In its illusory quest for decarbonisation, the EU is going so far as to tax a fundamental and inescapable human need: heating, cooking, washing and moving. French President Emmanuel Macron already wanted to tax travel but the “yellow jackets” prevented him from doing so. This time, we will not escape, however, because the EU has now decided this.

With this, we are far from the goal of the founders of the European Community, which was to provide citizens and industry with abundant and cheap energy. It is no wonder that citizens have no sympathy for the EU. The May 2024 elections will be a tricky moment.

When you put a frog in hot water, it tries to escape, but if you put it in a pan of cold water and slowly increase the temperature, it will eventually cook itself. After 60 years of caring for the economy and the citizens with a vision of growth and prosperity, in homeopathic doses, the EU has been preparing for some years now to levy taxes under the pretext that it wants to save the planet by setting an example to the rest of the world.

Europeans are no wiser than the frog. For years, the European institutions have been warning us that in order to achieve the decarbonisation of our society, the price of energy will need to increase, to encourage us to consume less.

The obligation to use renewable energies has been tried, but after half a century of subsidies and various promotions, solar and wind energies represent only 3% of the EU’s primary energy consumption. Moreover, Germany no longer tolerates nuclear energy, which is decarbonised, abundant and cheap. To avoid carbon emissions, we must therefore consume less, either willingly (happy sobriety) or by force (taxation).

Unfortunately, voters did not pay attention to this, and they are now faced with the harsh reality that the EU will tax us more and more unnecessarily. This is what it is doing with the “Net Zero” strategy, also known as “Fit 55”.

It should be noted that the EU is not talking about a «tax», but about an auction market system for energy, the “European Union Emissions Trading System” (ETS). The EU would not dare to try to introduce an energy tax, given how Article 194.3 of the Lisbon Treaty stipulates that decisions on taxation in the field of energy must be taken unanimously. And since not all 27 Member States are as convinced as Germany that energy should be expensive, an energy tax is out of the question.

That is not all. In Brussels and Strasbourg, they do not hesitate to say that climate change is an opportunity to finally impose “social justice”, i.e. to ask the middle class to pay more to help the less well-off social classes. On Euronews, Malin Björk, Swedish MEP for The Left, stated that “climate policies are about rebalancing social differences”, while insisting that the pretext of decarbonisation “is inherently right to fight the rich”. With “taxes” to “save the planet”, the objective of the Left is to take revenge after the victory of the market economy over socialism, aka sovietism.

Since 1992, they have made people believe that the Earth’s temperature was going to increase more and more, to the point that people believed it. Even me, since I managed this file at the Directorate-General for Energy of the European Commission from 1994 to 2000. It took a while, but gradually, I realised that it was all exaggerated and that we were not “on the road to hell” as Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, claims.

As my former professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles taught me, it is not even proven that the 1.3°C temperature increase over the last 120 years is partly or entirely due to driving cars and heating with gas or oil. Daring to say that the IPCC is not actually stating the certainties and exaggerations claimed by activists is a taboo, but well.

In order to avoid the improbable hell, they want to force us to reduce our CO₂ emissions. This is what we have been told since 1992, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted. And despite this, global CO₂ emissions have increased by 60%. So they have decided to force us to do more. How? By making energy more expensive, by taxing it.

They warned us they would tax

As soon as the tandem of Ursula von der Leyen and Frans Timmermans took over the European Commission in 2019, they announced that EU citizens would be forced to change their lifestyles in order to ‘save the planet’ and show that Europe (!) is ‘the first decarbonised continent’.

In 2021, the European Commission adopted a package of legislative proposals called “Fit for 55”, aiming to achieve the EU’s target of a 55% reduction in CO₂ emissions by 2030 in order to reach “net zero” by 2050, climate neutrality. They did not dare to specify whether this target should be achieved by 1 January or 31 December 2050, however.

To convince us of its determination, the European Commission has placed a stopwatch on its website that shows to the second the time left to reach zero carbon emissions: 9749 days, 5 hours, 56 minutes and 49 seconds as I write this sentence.

All this while China built more than 100 coal-fired power plants last year,  as Xi Jinping’s country plans to speed up approval of new coal mines and accelerate construction of already-approved mines to support its baseload energy supply during peak demand. If CO₂ emissions have any effect at all, it is to ridicule those who hope they will decrease through taxes. 

In sum, the European institutions warned us that they would control our lives through carbon. But we did not react. So we are not surprised that last week the European Parliament adopted three pieces of legislation announced by the Fit 55 package. A ‘carbon tax’, disguised as an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), a carbon tax at the EU’s borders on raw materials and a directive to distribute part of the carbon tax ‘to the poorest’. The compromises for which the European Parliament is known have resulted in hundreds of pages of legislation which only officials and consultants can decipher.

In the midst of the energy crisis, when more and more people are cutting back on heating and can no longer afford to pay their energy bills, the EU is taxing energy. In what kind of world are they living in?

The joy of taxing

The Greens in the European Parliament are satisfied, as they have been demanding this for years. “We should have adopted it decades ago,” Swedish green MEP Jakop Dalunde commented on Euronews. MEP Malin Björk (GUE/NGL), on the same programme, “regrets that it doesn’t go further”.

On the contrary, it seems to me that the European Parliament has gone too far in deciding that EU citizens will pay a “carbon tax” for heating, cooking and washing with hot water. It is true that in Germany the environmentalists have convinced a part of the population that to save the planet we should wash with cold water, without soap and reducing to flush the toilet in order to save water in this rainy country.

Our gas and fuel bills will rise, just as what happened with our electricity bills, since the EU mandated electricity generation from renewable sources. This time, it’s thanks to the new Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS II in Brussels-Strasbourg jargon) for road transport and domestic fuels, which will put a price on greenhouse gas emissions from these sectors in 2027 (“or 2028 if energy prices are exceptionally high”. … admire the generosity!)

Until now, this emissions trading scheme only applied to heavy industry (steel, refineries and cement plants, glass factories, chemicals), power plants and civil aviation. It has now been extended to the maritime sector and there are plans to strengthen the measures for civil aviation. Airline tickets will therefore cost more. Private cars will also be taxed more.

Of course the climate is an excuse

In its great largesse, knowing that many Europeans will not be able to pay these new taxes and that others will find them unfair and unnecessary, the European Parliament, on the proposal of the Commission, also adopted a «social climate fund”, amounting to 86.7 billion euros. This will be financed partly by our taxes and partly by a redistribution of the revenue from the ETS system, a ‘carbon tax’ which cannot be named as such.

In order to avoid a “yellow jacket” revolution, the EU will redistribute part of these levies to vulnerable households, micro-businesses and transport users particularly affected by fuel poverty. Simply defining and verifying who will benefit will involve a lot of red tape that will waste some of the revenue.

This is socialism. But for environmentalists in all political parties, the temperature of the frog’s water is not yet warm enough: they see the current tax increase not as an end, but as a beginning, a springboard for even more taxes. As the climate scientist Richard Lindzen (a professor at the prestigious MIT in Boston, but partly resident in Paris) has said, “If you control carbon, you control life.»

If you think it’s fair for you to pay these new taxes, while the rest of the world continues to consume more and more fossil fuels, do nothing. Otherwise, take action to overturn the current large, cross-party green majority in the European Parliament in the May 2024 elections. We are talking about a large majority here, because this text was approved by 413 votes in favour, 167 against and 57 abstentions. Only 26% voted against the EU heating tax.

Originally published in French by Atlantico

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