AMSTERDAM - In a meeting at the economic affairs ministry in The Hague late last year, Tata Steel’s Dutch chief Theo Henrar pledged he would spend hundreds of millions of euros to cut factory emissions - on condition the government invested a similar amount.
Tata Steel, the largest corporate polluter in the Netherlands, proposed that it would build a 500-million-euro energy-efficient alternative to its blast furnace at its plant near Amsterdam using newly developed technology, Henrar told Reuters. The government will in June outline its strategy for switching the country - among the most polluting in the European Union - to more sustainable sources of energy.
In the Netherlands, it is not just Tata Steel. In a separate proposal, Tata, Dow Chemical, another of the biggest polluters, and fellow steelmaker ArcelorMittal have together pitched a 1.3-billion-euro project to the government that would see Dow using gases from steel factories in its chemical plants to make plastics, reducing its need for fossil fuels.
With Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s pro-business VVD party in power, discussions were headed toward an outcome that favored corporates. But last month, in the face of opposition from voters and climate experts, the government said it would introduce a national corporate CO2 tax on top of the European Trading System which penalizes high polluters across the EU.
“The Netherlands is further behind on all of its goals than the rest of the EU,” the government’s top climate adviser, Pieter Boot, told Reuters in an interview. “We have simply done too little in the past 20 years.” Rutte said the tax would be “reasonable” and would not chase business away, but gave no further details.“A tax does not stimulate companies to make unprofitable investments,” said Hans Gruenfeld, head of industry lobby group VEMW. “The Dutch are trying to get companies to suddenly move faster than elsewhere in Europe. There’s a large chance that will only shift production abroad, without reducing CO2 emissions on an international scale,” he said.