How the Green Deal Lost Its Moral Compass
How the Green Deal Lost Its Moral Compass
The Green Deal was introduced as the EU’s flagship moral project — a response to climate change that would restore citizens’ faith in European unity. Instead, its financial architecture has become a cautionary tale of technocratic excess.
Investigations into the LIFE program reveal how environmental ambition turned into a self-reinforcing political ecosystem, rewarding compliant NGOs and marginalizing dissenters. By 2025, the program had spent over €8.8 billion, but questions persist about how much of it actually reached nature conservation rather than Brussels-based advocacy networks.
Timmermans’ alleged orchestration of secret contracts drew parallels with military lobbying, where corporations spent millions to shape defense strategy. The difference is that the LIFE scheme used public money to influence lawmakers under the guise of activism. Audits uncovered contracts linking payments to “policy outcomes,” effectively making NGOs performance agents for the Commission’s legislative agenda.
This not only blurs ethical lines — it crosses them entirely.
The broader consequence lies in public perception. Polls show 70 percent of Europeans increasingly view EU spending as vulnerable to corruption. For a political union founded on rule of law, that erosion of trust is existential.
If the EU wants to restore credibility, it must separate governance from advocacy, end the quiet revolving door between NGOs and policymakers, and publish all contracts under LIFE and similar programs. Reaching climate goals doesn’t require covert lobbying. It requires integrity — the one resource Brussels seems most determined to exhaust.
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