The new report, Permission to Pollute, reveals how the European Commission is taking a chainsaw to permitting rules for energy and industrial infrastructure. This is part of a wider deregulatory push driven by some of Europe’s most polluting industries. Although the EU presents this agenda as the “simplification” of permitting laws, in practice, it risks eroding the hard-won social and environmental protections that underpin these rules.

Since European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, took up her second term in office, permitting rules have come under sustained attack from Big Tech, the fossil fuel industry, and mining lobby groups. What’s more, under labels such as “strategic” or “overriding public interest”, harmful projects are increasingly able to side-step normal permitting procedures. But who decides what sort of projects enjoy the label?

Documents obtained by CEO expose how major polluters have lobbied for easier access to permits – and public subsidies – for polluting infrastructure projects. They reveal how the European Commission has actively invited industry players to shape its permitting deregulation agenda. Europe risks not only living with more pollution but paying polluters to create it.

Some of the key industry demands being delivered include:

• fast-tracked permitting for industrial and energy infrastructure, side-lining democratic participation;
• simpler, quicker environmental assessments, meaning less protection;
• more dirty projects classed as ‘strategic’ or ‘public interest’ and therefore getting special treatment in permitting processes, elevated above environmental or social concerns;
• water protection and nature laws opened up to be weakened.