Draghi Report: keeping decarbonising and competing together

Speaking yesterday at the European Parliament, Mario Draghi reiterated the importance of combining decarbonization and competitiveness. To achieve this, in addition to acting to reduce energy costs through a mix of interventions (including nuclear), it will be important to protect the European cleantech sector (which, despite being a pioneer on many fronts, is now losing ground to China), as well as to provide substantial aid to hard-to-abate industries.

The key message of the Draghi report on this front is, therefore, to combine different policies - which, as currently structured, risk traveling disconnected from each other - by providing a common intervention plan that on the one hand promotes decarbonization (to meet the climate goals set by the EU), but on the other does not sacrifice competitiveness.

A challenging path, dotted with very different obstacles ranging from a series of specific European limitations (high energy costs, stringent regulations, bottlenecks in networks, and overall limitations in the innovation support system) to a series of exogenous factors s