Asked by POLITICO whether Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is a green champion, Thunberg shook her head and replied “no.”
The 21-year-old founder of the Fridays for Future movement was later detained as Belgian authorities moved in to break up the demonstration.
Among the demonstrators gathering at a simultaneous demonstration outside the Parliament on the city’s Place du Luxembourg were Commission employees frustrated with the slow progress on climate action.
“I worked directly on the trilogues of the environment action program, so I know how tricky it can be to get things done,” said one staffer, granted anonymity to speak freely.
“There’s a lot of tools the institutions have now to fight climate change, but since the election there’s been a lot of backtracking,” this staffer said. “It’s now all about competitiveness and the ‘clean industrial deal,’ whatever that means. The urgency has been lost — the Parliament has shifted to the right, the Commission in many ways has shifted to the right — and discussion of the climate has faded into the background.”
According to Simone Tagliapietra, an economist and energy expert at Bruegel think tank, “we have seen an incapability of the European governments to phase out subsidies to fossil fuel or at least to make them more targeted.”
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