The EU leaders’ summit ended on Thursday with a failure to agree on common language on energy issues, forcing the topic to be dropped from the Council conclusions, according to Politico.
The two key differences were over the Emissions Trading System (ETS) and an upcoming effort to include nuclear in the EU’s taxonomy of sustainable investments.
„There is not a secret that there were different opinions around the table,” said Charles Michel, the European Council president after the summit.
The Czech and Polish delegations reportedly pressed for an exemption from the ETS, blaming the soaring price of permits for the bloc-wide jump in power prices, a contention that many experts reject.
Going into the summit, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki denounced the ETS as a “European energy tax” but admitted that Poland has “adversaries” in Western Europe who don’t agree with Warsaw’s views.
After the summit, Morawiecki tweeted, that the ETS „does not work” and needs deep reform. „We could not allow for the acceptance of empty conclusions.”
There were also splits over the taxonomy, with pro-nuclear countries pushing for the issue to be mentioned in the conclusions, something rejected by anti-nuclear Germany, Austria and Luxembourg.
Although several draft revisions of the energy conclusions circulated, in the end the effort failed and resulted in a rare abandonment of conclusions for an item on the summit’s agenda.