Evangelos Mytilineos took a position on the statements of the President of the Commission with his post on linkedin:
Some remarks regarding the speech by Ursula von der Leyen on the State of the Union.
The industrial future of the EU will be shaped not only by ambition, but by its ability to turn strategy into investment.
President von der Leyen's State of the Union speech last week contained several messages in this direction. The proposed European Corporation on Critical Raw Materials could evolve into a useful industrial initiative. Europe still depends heavily on third countries for many of the materials that support the energy transition, digital technologies, defense applications and advanced manufacturing.
The transition from identifying vulnerabilities to developing capabilities is the challenge we face. This means supporting mature domestic projects for mining, refining, processing and recycling in Europe, while at the same time ensuring diversified partnerships with reliable suppliers, creating truly attractive conditions for long-term investments across the entire value chain.
Equally important, however, was the recognition that Europe faces an urgent and broad competitiveness challenge. Strategic autonomy, critical raw materials, batteries, artificial intelligence, defense technologies and industrial decarbonization require unprecedented levels of capital investment. However, investment decisions are ultimately made on the basis of economic fundamentals. And perhaps the most important of these fundamentals is energy.
Europe's long-term goal of reducing its dependence on imported fossil fuels, expanding nuclear and renewable generation, and strengthening energy infrastructure is moving in the right direction. But the end state and the transition are not the same thing.
Today, the European Union still consumes about 450 million tons of oil and about 340 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually. Even according to the baseline forecasts, these figures remain very significant until 2030 and even 2035.
For many more years, hydrocarbons will continue to affect industrial competitiveness, wholesale electricity prices, and the energy bills paid by European households and businesses.
As Mario Draghi noted in his report, the full competitiveness benefits of the clean transition will be realized only when sufficient investments in clean generation, grids, storage and system flexibility are completed and integrated into the system.
This reality has a significant consequence. Europe cannot wait for the energy system of the future to take shape before addressing the issue of competitiveness. We need a strategy for the transition itself.
This requires a truly European response to the energy challenge. Not a patchwork of national measures available only to the member states with the greatest fiscal capacity, but common European solutions, supported by European financing and designed to preserve industrial competitiveness as the transition progresses.
Global competitiveness is not the reward at the end of the transition. It is what makes the transition possible in the first place.