Although the European Commission is meant to carry out a thorough impact assessment before proposing new policies, the European Union’s policymaking process is increasingly being influenced by business lobbies and guided by political expediency and whim. This approach will result in serious negative consequences.
When looking at European Union climate policymaking, impact assessments, which are required under and the ‘Better Regulation’ guidelines seem to have become pretty much optional over the last 18 months. And when the European Commission does carry out impact assessments, it routinely ignores them when proposing or revising legislation.
We’re witnessing seemingly random announcements of specific policy interventions and changes that do not respect required procedures. The labour movement considers the Better Regulation initiative to be a deregulatory agenda. But what once appeared to be a weakening of EU governance might feel like basic quality standards now.
These guidelines are meant to ensure that the Commission thoroughly investigates the potential impact of a proposal before proposing new laws or adapting existing ones. Whether or not the guidelines are effective, its goal should be an obvious part of any policymaking process, especially since this aligns clearly with the ‘precautionary principle’. But several recent major proposals (or key elements thereof) were not subjected to impact assessments and/or public consultations.
The EU Ombudsperson even labelled three cases reported by civil society organisations as ‘maladministration’. There are however many more cases than just those three, pointing towards a culture, under the current Commission led by Ursula von der Leyen, of ‘vibe-based’ policy proposals (including on climate) rather than evidence-based and transparent processes . Interestingly, Executive Vice President of the Commission Teresa Ribera has been outspoken in her opposition to the path taken by her boss, saying it causes uncertainty. Calling it “Trumpist” and a “terrible political spectacle”- she warned against simplification becoming “self-harm”.
Is the European Union entering (or continuing?) an age of flying blind while policymaking, or can we swing the pendulum back before more damage is done?
The driver of this evolution is the accelerated push to deregulate environmental and social regulation (under a return to the bad old days of so-called ‘simplification’ and ‘competitiveness’ under the Juncker commission of 2014 to 2019) and let industry self-regulate. Many pieces of the deregulation agenda are ripping long negotiated agreements to shreds and only preserving those pieces that industries and their political allies like.
But that shouldn’t be seen as a coincidence. The independent corporate research centre SOMO reports that at least one policy (the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive) was watered down following a secretive cabal of US polluters coordinated unleashing its significant lobbying power to pressure the EU to not force them to be transparent about, and tackle, human rights abuses and environmental damage throughout their supply chains.
Let’s take a deeper look at knee-jerk and vibe-based policymaking that has been flying under the radar and present key examples of the increasing lack of evidence-based policymaking in the EU’s climate sphere.
Freeloading on future generations
In July 2025, the Commission proposed its revision of the EU Climate Law (which included setting a 2040 climate target). A key and deeply problematic element in that proposal was to scrap the domestic nature of EU climate targets by allowing for international credits to cover 3% of the emissions reduction goal (in practice, that would have meant that the EUs 2040 emissions would be allowed to be 30% higher than under a purely domestic target). While the proposal mentioned a “possible” use of international offsets, Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra made it clear during a press conference that he saw it as a certainty, undermining the more balanced and carefully negotiated language of the proposal itself.
Even after considering extensive signalling and even lobbying by the climate commissioner, this still caught many policy wonks in Brussels by surprise. Not just because the EU was taking an enormous step back by blowing up the domestic scope of the 2040 target, but also because international credits had not been considered or analysed in the impact assessment and public consultation processes run more than a year earlier.
There is literally not a single reference to international credits or Article 6 of the Paris Agreement in the Commission’s original 2040 target Communication nor the 605 pages of the accompanying impact assessment. CMW’s estimates show that requiring international credits to reach our own targets wouldn’t just slow down the transition to a clean and competitive future, but could – conservatively – cost up to €50 billion.
Surely such an important change to the EUs climate framework and an integral part of the 2040 proposal should have been number-crunched before it was proposed? A propos, the ‘possible 3%’ opening to international credits was added to make the EU Climate Law revision palatable to laggard member states. But they succeeded in making it a ‘up to 5%’, that could even be increased further down the road when policies that make up the EU’s climate framework are revised throughout 2026.
This makes it even more obvious that it was a bad negotiating tactic for the European Commission to open up the Pandora’s box of international credits. Climate action at home will now somehow (and misguidedly) be traded off with dubious carbon credits from third countries, without any assessment of costs, trade-offs and quality of relying on those credits. Costs that next generations of policymakers and citizens will have to cough up for.
Jumping to conclusions
Another important decision was announced by the European Commission in the run up to releasing the 2040 target proposal: Hoekstra said he will integrate permanent removals into the EUs carbon market. This was equally surprising as the Commission services and their consultants were (and still are) working on the impact assessment related to the revision of the EU carbon market scheduled in 2026. The Emissions Trading System (ETS) Directive does mandate the Commission to look into this policy option (but also sets some safeguards – notably on not offsetting necessary emission reductions, see Art 30(5)b). But apparently investigating how any integration could be done and how this safeguard could be respected is no longer necessary.
The von der Leyen Commission has taken a decision, and doesn’t seem to need to follow the normal process for evidence-based policymaking. This means that the public at large has no insight into the economic, social and environmental consequences of the decision made.
This contrasts sharply with the precautionary principle that is meant to underpin environmental laws and even the stated purpose of the Better Regulation guidelines, which is to ensure “legislation that achieves its objectives while being targeted [and] effective”.
How can we know whether the various options, trade-offs and impacts (three core tenets of impact assessments) are properly considered?
Rather than evidence being used to guide policy, this turn of events indicates that policymakers dictate marching orders to the staff and consultants involved in researching and writing the impact assessment.
This raises the question of whether the upcoming impact assessment on revising the carbon market will present an honest and open assessment of the interplay between the ETS and carbon removals, or whether there will be significant pressure on the hard-working civil servants writing the impact assessment to adapt their findings to fit the stated priorities of their commissioner.
It creates doubt about the quality of the eventual impact assessment, and the credibility of the proposal and its contribution to the climate transition EU citizens and companies are facing. In addition, it also calls into question whether hiring consultants to look into policy options and pros and cons is a prudent and sensible use of limited tax payer resources considering decisions are taken before that research is even finished.
And the list gets longer
These two are not the only examples of recent EU environmental and climate policy being rushed through in a non-transparent and unevidenced fashion.
In March 2024, the Commission decided to ‘simplify’ (i.e. cut out critical environmental aspects of) the Common Agriculture Policy. That proposal was not accompanied by an impact assessment at all, which the Ombudsperson labelled as ‘maladministration’, and in breach of the EU Climate Law which requires a ‘climate consistency assessment’ be made (Article 6.4 of the EU Climate Law).
The proposal on the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism tabled in December, was not fully open for debate during its drafting. A call for evidence was launched over the summer on two of its components: anti-circumvention measures and the extension to downstream products. However, a third key feature of this proposal, the Regulation establishing a Temporary Decarbonisation Fund to address “residual concerns of carbon leakage” (effectively, a measure aimed at financially supporting exports of CBAM products) was never brought up for discussion. Arguably, this last item is the most politically charged among the features that are now up for review, and impacts not only the CBAM Regulation but also the EU ETS Directive, which will be opened for revision this year.
In its July 2025 proposal for “Delivering on the Clean Industrial Deal I”, the European Commission guaranteed “further analysis of the risk of carbon leakage for the production of CBAM goods for exports in order to adequately design the measure”. However, no call for evidence was carried out, only a “high level dialogue” limited to corporations was organised by Commissioner Hoekstra and Industrial Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné on 28 October 2025. This lack of transparency is especially staggering for a proposal that plans to direct the use of EU resources (specifically CBAM revenue, which is projected to amount to around €2 billion per year starting in 2030, to cover the cost of its implementation.
In addition, changes to the state aid guidelines for compensating for the supposed costs of the EUs carbon market passed on to industrial consumers (so-called Indirect carbon cost compensation) show that the Commission plans to double the industrial sectors covered by this unnecessary, expensive and overly generous subsidy scheme.
The state aid guidelines allow for two ways to include sectors: a quantitative approach with hard criteria to be met, and a blackbox qualitative approach that boils down to which sectors can lobby the best. The Commission is abusing this backdoor again, and without evidence of any need, by allowing countries to hand out cash to more industrial sectors at will. This will mean more wasting of scarce resources and tipping the internal market playing field towards countries that are wealthy enough to give these subsidies – while state aid rules are supposed to present the latter.
On 27 November 2025, the Commission proposed changes to the Market Stability Reserve of the upcoming Emissions Trading System for road transport and buildings (ETS2), which would radically increase pollution allowed under the scheme. No impact assessment or public consultation whatsoever were conducted before the proposal. It’s clear the proposal was rushed and launched in response to pressure from 19 member states who demanded such a reform in a letter to the Commission over the summer.
The Commission justifies the absence of a new impact assessment by referring to the one prepared in 2021 in the run up to the last ETS review. In that impact assessment, the complexity of setting the initial parameters of the MSR for the ETS2 is noted and caveated with a need to improve those parameters at a later stage. But the Commission didn’t present any analysis on the suggested changes to the Market Stability Reserve, and how these may impact the functioning of the system. Yet up to 600 million allowances in the MSR may flood the ETS2 carbon market, which is equivalent to 10 years of ETS2 emission reductions.
The failure to conduct a public consultation is justified in the same manner by referring to the ETS stakeholder consultation from 2021, as well as subsequent feedback from member states and national stakeholders. This cannot replace a dedicated transparent public consultation process on the specific changes now suggested, especially given their significant impact on the system’s climate effectiveness. The lack of a dedicated impact assessment and public consultation has resulted in confusion on the impact of these changes and has undermined transparency and societal buy-in.
Informed and effective climate policy
While these issues and examples seem arcane, they have real consequences because the EU is now increasingly taking a whim-based approach to decision-making instead of weighing up all the potential ramifications of a decision before selecting the best option. Impact assessments have a history of being politically directed and flawed exercises, but the current College of Commissioners doesn’t even seem to want to really engage in the necessary lip service to the Better Regulation guidelines.
The EU is now drifting (or being pushed?) further and further away from evidence-based policymaking that should lead to effective, targeted and proportional policies. Impact assessments are key analysis documents that show how seriously EU policymakers take the impact and trade offs associated with different scenarios into account when proposing legislation. If rushed and undefended policy proposals become the norm, every citizen and company in the EU loses – as predictability, transparency and accountability are hollowed out of the process. Making the EU competitive means making it green and clean, and robust evidence-based policymaking is key to making the right choices. Make Impact Assessments Great (Again?).
