The EU summit fails to unlock the Ets, but Rome reaches agreement on energy bills

The European Council meeting in Brussels addressed in parallel two dossiers that this newspaper’s morning edition had not yet reported on: financial support for Ukraine and the revision of the European emissions trading system, the Ets2, requested by Rome.

On the first front, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reminded the assembled leaders that the European Union and its member states currently provide 80% of the external aid destined for Ukraine, and called on other international partners to contribute more. This is an argument the Commission uses to shift part of the financial burden of support for Kyiv onto actors that have so far contributed less.

On the sanctions front, European Council President António Costa reiterated that this is not the time to ease restrictive measures against Russia, a position that fits into the debate opened in recent weeks over the resilience of the Western front in the face of pressure for a negotiated solution to the conflict.

The second dossier concerns Italy more directly. The summit produced no agreement on the Ets system: the Italian request for a thorough revision of the mechanism ran up against opposition from the Nordic countries, which oppose calling the current framework into question. The Council’s conclusions were limited to tasking the Commission with updating the impact assessment of the Ets2, effectively postponing the political decision to a later stage.

On a related front, that of energy costs for households and businesses, Palazzo Chigi announced in parallel an agreement with the European Commission on the Italian Bollette decree, the measure through which the government intends to intervene on rising energy prices. The announcement clearly separates the two levels: on one hand, the European deadlock over the general framework of climate policies; on the other, a bilateral agreement between Rome and Brussels on a specific national measure.

The summit’s twofold outcome illustrates the gap between Italy’s ambitions for a structural reform of the Ets2 and what the rest of the Union is willing to concede at this stage: an updated impact assessment, not the revision requested by Rome, while on the more limited front of national energy bills the technical agreement with the Commission has already been reached.