The European Commission announced plans to significantly revamp its economic strategy to meet the demands of the European Union’s major industry players, who have long complained about excessive taxation, exorbitant energy prices, and an impenetrable bureaucracy.
The “Simplification Omnibus” aims to enable the 27-nation bloc to compete with the likes of the United States and China.
“This will make life easier for our businesses while ensuring we stay firmly on course toward our decarbonization goals. And more simplification is on the way.”
The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, aims to reduce reporting burdens by 25 percent in an initial wave of measures in the first half of 2025. It said this would translate into savings of 40 billion euros ($42 billion) for European companies.
The plans will exempt any company with fewer than 1,000 employees from the CSRD rules—roughly 80 percent of the companies currently covered by the directive.
The due diligence law, meanwhile, will be delayed by a year until 2028 and will only require companies to make environmental and human rights checks on their direct suppliers rather than along the entire supply chain.
EU Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero, and Clean Growth Wopke Hoekstra described the move as “a game changer for Europe’s economy.”
“It is a business plan to truly re-industrialize our European Union,” he said, adding that it was the reaction the bloc needed to reverse more than a decade of decline in the global marketplace.
“We’re all too aware that our slow economic growth, our dependencies, and the fragmented market we still operate in are increasingly a problem, particularly against a backdrop of volatile geopolitics,” Hoekstra said.
EU Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis added that, with the United States becoming a more uncertain ally by the week, the plan should be seen as a “call to action” to free EU industries from excessive constraints and provide them with aid where necessary.
“Put simply, we cannot hope or expect to successfully compete in a perilous world with one hand tied behind our backs,” Dombrovskis said.
In the package of plans ranging from slashing red tape to lowering energy prices, the EU executive branch came up with investments of up to hundreds of billions and savings of tens of billions of euros.
Hoekstra said the plans include an “industrial decarbonization” bank, which could raise up to 100 billion euros ($105 billion) in the next decade.
“But then, if you leverage that, if you put private sector money next to that, you could easily add up to a number of 400 billion euros ($420 billion),” he said.
The plans will now go to the EU parliament and the capitals of the 27 member states for further assessment before they can formally become laws and regulations.
However, environmental groups say that far-reaching deregulation and the boosting of conditions for energy-intensive corporations will come at a cost to the Brussels net-zero target ambitions.
They say the plans stand to profit fossil fuel-intensive industries like steel plants and cement factories.
“The European Green Deal was hailed as a ‘man on the moon’ moment,” the EEB said in a statement. “Today, the narrative seems tailored primarily to energy-intensive industries and big corporations. But industrial policy should prioritize public interest, not just industry demands.”
