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The UK has now left the EU just as a seemingly progressive new president, Ursula von der Leyen, sets out her plan for addressing the climate emergency. According to Yanis Varoufakis (left), Greece’s former Finance Minister, and unwelcome interlocutor during the currency and debt crises that nearly saw Greece default, it all amounts to Green washing.

Varoufakis asks us to compare the intervention by the EU in the banking crisis to that “committed” for climate change. He notes that €1.6tn was channelled to Europe’s bankers, “while imposing stringent austerity upon the European citizens they pledged to serve. When in 2015 they realised that more support was necessary, the European Central Bank printed €2.6tn”. The European green deal is worth €1tn over 10-years “to reduce the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% compared with 1990”. The contrast is not all it seems. The money used to bail out banks was new money, of the Green Deal budget only €7.5bn is new money, the rest comes from existing budgets and is designed to trigger a private-sector investment boom. Moreover, the EU Commission is is providing €29bn for gas projects.

The EU Commission itself estimates that annually it should commit €260bn to meeting its own emission targets. Varoufakis argues that the EU remains committed to its austerity package at a time of need (for drastic emissions cuts) and opportunity (to transform the economies of European member states). There is a thing called the “just transition mechanism” which recognises that some member states’ economies are more locked into fossil fuels than others; for example, Hungary and Poland, both of which have overtly populist governments, themselves not on message when it comes to climate change. For Varoufakis, the “just transition mechanism” is anything but – but it might just go some way to at least prevent these member states from making too much noise.

Picture: Olaf Kosinsky