Javier Benegas (b. 1965) is a Spanish political analyst and writer, co-founder of the Spanish daily Vozpópuli, of which he was opinion director, and founder of the think tank ThinkAct, as well as editor of the political and sociological analysis journal Disidentia.

In 2022, the European Parliament rejected the objection to the European Commission’s delegated act to include gas and nuclear energy in the list of environmentally sustainable economic activities in the so-called green taxonomy. What was decided was whether these two energy sources could be considered as renewables in support of those that are actually renewable and currently cannot produce all the electricity that EU member states need.
Opponents of the inclusion of gas and nuclear energy in the green taxonomy argued that this labelling system is mainly indicative. Therefore, the only thing that is achieved by including these energy sources in the green taxonomy is to confuse the public. And in this last respect they are right.

However, it is not true that the taxonomy is a purely indicative initiative. The stated aim of the taxonomy is to provide and incentivise economic investment in one direction and hinder it in others. As stated in the report produced by the EU Sustainable Finance Platform: „The taxonomy is the cornerstone of the legislative initiatives launched as part of the 2018 Sustainable Finance Action Plan”.

The same report specifies how the environmental components of the EU taxonomy should be expanded. One important component is the creation of four classifications for economic activities, depending on their environmental damage and the urgency of the transition. The aim of this labelling is to direct funding towards economic activities that do not have a negative impact on the environment. This will condition companies and industries to tell their transition „stories” if they want to access green finance. At the same time, the identification of low environmental impact activities will allow companies that fall into this category to have full access to green finance for their environmental expenditures.

In principle, the taxonomy will only apply to public financing, but since its scope of application is general, private financial institutions will also be able to be classified as sustainable or not depending on which economic activities and companies they lend to. Thus, if they want to curry favour with the Brussels bureaucrats and access their share of public funding, they will have to take on this taxonomy as their own. This means that the taxonomy will guide not only public credit but also private credit.

The EU taxonomy is much more than labelling. It is, as its promoters themselves recognise, the cornerstone of the social engineering that is intended to impose a monotheistic energy transition. A transition that has been forced to grant a dispensation to nuclear energy and gas by imperative needs. But this does not mean recognition that the energy transition as planned is nonsense, because it is driven by a disturbing ideological conviction.
In the West, there has always been a close relationship between confidence in the general progress of humanity and the need for economic growth and development. Indeed, fifth-century Athens had a deep respect for the economic foundations on which Greek civilisation was built. The only exceptions to this trend have been those who believed that the golden age of humanity was not in the future but in its beginnings. For this minority, economic and technological progress has always been responsible for moral and social decline.

However, from the second half of the 20th century onwards, Western society developed a growing hostility towards economic growth. Thus, the fear has become widespread that both humanity and the planet are doomed to disaster unless we are able to curb growth.

It is irrelevant that renewable energies are currently not achieving the volumes of energy supply predicted years ago, or that emissions are not being reduced anywhere near as much as predicted, or that the electrification of the car fleet is not even a third of what was promised. In reality, all these mistakes only contribute to the achievement of one goal: the end of growth – but only in Europe.

The green taxonomy, if finally implemented as it is conceived, will have a particularly negative impact on the countries of the East, because their nascent economic take-off needs cheap and abundant energy. Here too, Europe seems bent on committing suicide.

Javier Benegas (b. 1965) is a Spanish political analyst and writer, co-founder of the Spanish daily Vozpópuli, of which he was opinion director, and founder of the think tank ThinkAct, as well as editor of the political and sociological analysis journal Disidentia. He is a regular contributor to various Spanish media, both in the press and on radio and television, and is a prominent contributor to The Objective. He is the author of the essays Sociedad terminal: La comunicación como arma de destrucción masiva (2007) [Terminal Society: Communication as a Weapon of Mass Destruction], co-author of Catarsis. Se vislumbra el final del régimen (2013) [Catharsis. The end of the regime in sight] and author of La ideología invisible: Claves del nuevo totalitarismo que infecta a las sociedades occidentales (2020) [The Invisible Ideology: Keys to the New Totalitarianism Infecting Western Societies] y Vindicación (2022) [Vindication].