Greenwashing: never let your guard down Popular primary: A consultation in the form of a showdown The climate emergency imposes measures to break with liberal logic

From environmental groups to the Club of Rome to the powerful coalition of investors IIGCC, which weighs 50 trillion dollars in assets and brings together more than 370 institutions, criticism continues to rain. All accuse the European Commission of having misused a tool that was to be the centerpiece of the sustainable finance strategy of the European Union (EU) to make it a new greenwashing standard.

China and Russia, the world's second largest gas producer, have excluded gas from their taxonomy. South Korea ruled out nuclear, and the ISO standard decided to ban both. But the EU, supposedly a leader in sustainable finance and the fight against climate change, decides to include them. Which, by the way, ruins the credibility of the tool and risks undermining its chances of achieving its own climate objectives, thus misleading investors on the direction to give urgently to their capital.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), carbon neutrality by 2050 following a "1.5°C trajectory" implies multiplying by six the production of electricity from solar energy and wind power by 2030, and to completely decarbonize European electricity production by 2035.

The Commission is not only trampling on the work and recommendations of the members of the EU Sustainable Finance Platform and, previously, of the Technical Expert Group on Sustainable Finance (TEG). It also goes against the standards that already exist at European level in terms of sustainable finance (it should be noted that nuclear power and gas are also excluded from the French Greenfin label) and makes the taxonomy de facto useless for the construction of financial products intended to finance the transition. Unsurprisingly, many sustainable finance professionals and groups – including the European organization Eurosif – opposed the proposed inclusion of gas and nuclear. The European Consumers' Association (BEUC) summed up the situation by denouncing an "unacceptable institutional greenwashing". The result should alert us to our ability to guarantee the adoption of political measures commensurate with the climate emergency. It was not a revolutionary or disruptive text. Admittedly, the activities listed should benefit from better financing conditions, but nothing will prevent financial actors from supporting activities that are not listed. And yet, here already, science has given way to politics.

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Like other regulations, this text has not escaped lobbying from industrialists. And those in gas and nuclear have worked hard since the Commission's TEG first recommended gas and nuclear exclusion in March 2020. According to a study by Reclaim Finance, in 2021, 182 gas companies and interest groups mobilized 776 people annually at a cost of between 65 and 78 million euros. Thus, gas lobbyists obtained more than one meeting every two days with European officials from January 2020 to May 2021. Better regulation, or even prohibition, of these meetings would not be enough to solve the problem of conflicts of interest. but would certainly be a condition.

Gas and nuclear interests have especially found a powerful ally in France. In the name of nuclear (but perhaps not reluctant to support the integration of gas to satisfy the interests of certain large French groups such as TotalEnergies), France has made common cause with other countries such as Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic to call for gas and nuclear to be qualified as sustainable. Other European countries, perhaps less culpable, nevertheless bear some responsibility for the current situation. Germany, for example, publicly opposed the inclusion of nuclear but did not show the same determination for gas, paving the way for the French proposal.

If the Commission persists and signs, and if the inclusion of gas and nuclear is approved – a very likely hypothesis as the dossier has become politically explosive –, financial players must not fall into greenwashing and must commit to excluding nuclear and gas from any so-called green or sustainable product. Beyond that, we must learn from the way the taxonomy has been perverted and learn a lesson: we must never let our guard down.

By Lucie Pinson Founder and director of Reclaim Finance, an association affiliated with Friends of the Earth France.