(Bloomberg) -- The European Union will not allow China to threaten its industry by flooding the market with cheap products during the transition to a cleaner economy, according to the bloc’s climate chief.
“We do face a China problem,” Wopke Hoekstra, the EU’s climate commissioner, said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
“It cannot be that our companies go bust because the marketplace is flooded with state-subsidized products,” he added. “That in the end will kill European industry and we will not allow it.”
The EU has taken an increasingly strong stance toward Chinese clean-tech products, with the bloc’s 27 member states set to vote on imposing tariffs on the country’s electric vehicles in the coming days.
It has also used a new tool — the foreign subsidies regulation — to crack down on what it perceives as the unfair advantage given to Chinese companies by the government in Beijing.
Hoekstra was nominated by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for five more years as the EU’s climate commissioner — and will add tax policy to his portfolio.
He told Bloomberg TV that Beijing was now rich enough to contribute to global efforts to stump up finance to help the developing world deal with the increasingly extreme impacts of global warming.
China has long been reluctant to contribute toward global climate-finance targets, arguing that it’s the responsibility of those countries that are the wealthiest and have contributed most CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution.
Yet that argument is wearing thin with the likes of the US and the EU, who say that China is vastly richer than when global climate negotiations started 30 years ago and is now the world’s biggest emitter.
Getting Beijing to pay and be transparent over how much money it is providing is set to be one of the biggest fights when global climate negotiators meet at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan in seven weeks time to agree a new post-2025 finance goal.
“If you’re able, like China, to go to the moon on a mission, then you’re also able to pay more in the domain of climate action,” Hoekstra said.
He called on the US to do more to tackle climate change too, no matter who is in the White House following November’s elections. While Europe has contributed up to a third of a $100 billion-per-year goal, the US has lagged behind due to stalemate in congress.
“We will continue to work with whoever is in the white house, but what I would like to see is more American leadership in the domain of climate action,” Hoekstra said.
“You have such an important role to play if you are the leader, not only of the free world, but of the world at large. People will be looking at you to double down on what is one of the most pressing problems of our age.”
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