"EU urged not to roll back green agenda in effort to revive faltering economy", 9 February 2026

EU leaders have been warned against a rollback of the green agenda before a summit focused on reviving the bloc’s waning economy.

Campaigners from the Climate Action Network, a pan-European group of NGOs, said European industry was “under real pressure” from “high energy prices, ageing assets, global overcapacity and delayed investments”, but these issues could not be solved by watering down climate and environmental policies. “Deregulation is not an industrial strategy,” the group wrote in an open letter, which argued that the problems facing energy-intensive industries, including steel, cement and chemicals, were driven by prices of fossil fuel-derived energy and global market dynamics, rather than environmental regulation.

However, the green campaigners argue that the deregulation agenda risks weakening the EU’s carbon price and other policies supporting the energy transition. “Without a strong and predictable carbon price, the business case for clean steel, green chemicals, circular materials and electrified industrial production collapses – and with it, the effectiveness of future industrial policy tools,” their letter says.