Will the EU cut the green blob’s funding?

Rumours from Europe suggest that the longstanding love-in between Eurocrats and the green blob is dissolving, and there will be no alimony.

First published in the Daily Sceptic.

According to an article in Politico, big changes may be afoot in the relationship between the European Council (EC) and the big NGOs that the EU monolith has long been funding. The EC “has told environmental NGOs that the money they receive from the EU’s green funds pot can no longer be used for advocacy and lobbying work”. If true, and if the extremely angry backlash from green organisations and their media pals doesn’t reverse the decision, this is big news. The EC has been extremely generous with public money over the years, and it would mean the loss of “€5.4 billion of funding between 2021 and 2027” to organisations such as WWF and Friends of the Earth, whose use of the cash, not only to lobby European and British politicians, has advanced their agendas throughout the public sphere.

Politico’s framing of this putative divorce between Big Green and the EU is that it reflects the “anti-green campaign promises from the center-right European People’s Party [EPP] during the EU election”. This would seem to mark the EPP as a climate sceptic group, but that would be very far from the truth. The EPP has long been the dominant group in European politics, and politicians from its fold, such as former European Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, and the current EC president, Ursula von der Leyen, have been nothing but so-called ‘climate champions’. However, the EPP has never been able to win a majority of seats, and so have formed a grand coalition with the Socialists & Democrats (S&D).