European Union in Crosshairs of Italian Criticism

Industrial executives and the Italian government have launched a two-pronged attack on the European Union’s economic and environmental policies. Speaking in Milan at the Italian Energy Summit (September 25-26), Claudio Descalzi (pictured), CEO of Italian energy giant ENI, said the European Union “produces words, rules, restrictions, and big guarantees.” According to Descalzi, “if you think of industry as a burden and have to buy and sell products, we’re not going to get very far.” However, according to Descalzi, it is necessary to “work with objective data to produce real solutions and facilitate processes in a pragmatic way, otherwise it is a road to nowhere. If this culture dominates, the energy transition in Europe will regress,” said the CEO of ENI on the first day of the Italian Energy Summit organized by the Italian political, economic, and financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.

For his part, Italy’s Economic Development Minister Adolfo Urso raised the alarm over the European Union’s ban on the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines starting 2035 under the green deal. In an interview with Britain’s Financial Times newspaper, he said Brussels’s decision could cause a “serious crisis” for European manufacturers and “jeopardize hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

In this context, Urso called for an urgent review of the European Green Deal, emphasizing that the current strategy “has already shown inconsistencies, causing the collapse of the European electric vehicle market and the crisis of carmakers.” He also criticized the “costliness” of electric cars, saying they are too expensive “compared to the incomes of European citizens in general and Italian citizens in particular.” To address these threats, Urso announced that he would “ask Brussels to postpone the timing of the ban and modify its content to allow the sale of synthetic and biofuel vehicles.”