The Commissioner for Climate says that “it would be naïve to deny that Europe has a Chinese problem”

The European Commissioner for Climate Action, Wopke Hoekstra, said on Monday that the European Union (EU) has “a Chinese problem” of unfair competition and pledged to protect emerging green industries such as electrolysers used to produce green hydrogen.

“China challenges us in such a fundamental way that it would be naïve to deny that Europe has a Chinese problem,” Hoekstra said in a speech at the opening of the academic year at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

The Climate Commissioner, proposed by The Hague to continue in Ursula von der Leyen’s next government, said that “Europe will have to face several potentially existential crises” in the coming years.

He referred to the possibility that the war in Ukraine will continue “beyond this decade”, climate change, artificial intelligence “disruptions” or “high levels of migration, and in some cases failed integration, have become a source of significant problems in several member states, and certainly in this one (the Netherlands)”.

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