What is unfolding in Brussels is not a technical adjustment or a minor recalibration of policy. It is a capitulation.

Under pressure from Germany, Italy, and the corporate titans of Europe’s auto industry, the European Commission is preparing to abandon its 2035 ban on new combustion-engine vehicles—a ban once heralded as proof that Europe understood the scale of the climate emergency.

Now it is being quietly dismantled, postponed, or hollowed out beyond recognition. This retreat, the most significant reversal of the EU’s environmental commitments in years, exposes the familiar truth: when ecological survival collides with corporate profit, profit wins.

The language used to justify the reversal is the language of decline. European automakers, long shielded by political deference, complain they cannot compete with Chinese and American rivals. Electric vehicles are too expensive, they say. Charging infrastructure is inadequate.

Consumers are hesitant. Rather than confront these failures as the result of decades of short-termism and underinvestment, political leaders have chosen the easier path—lower the standards, rewrite the rules, and call it realism.

Retreat And Surrender

What is dressed up as a “multi-technology approach” is in fact a license to delay. Biofuels, e-fuels, plug-in hybrids—these are not solutions but distractions, technical fig leaves meant to preserve the internal combustion engine and the industrial ecosystem built around it.

Environmental groups are right to point out that these fuels are scarce, costly, and far from carbon-neutral. But truth has little currency in a system designed to protect entrenched power.

The split within the auto sector itself is telling. The electric vehicle industry warns that this reversal will chill investment and push Europe further behind China, which has already committed fully to electrification. They understand what Europe’s political class refuses to admit: history does not wait for laggards. By clinging to obsolete technologies, Europe is not defending its industry—it is ensuring its irrelevance.

Managed Decay

This is the logic of late-stage capitalism applied to climate policy. Every crisis is managed, never solved. Every target is negotiable. Every promise dissolves under pressure. The European Commission speaks of flexibility and breathing space, while the planet burns and emissions continue to rise.

Corporate fleets, small EV categories, phased targets—these are administrative manoeuvres that avoid the central reality: meaningful climate action requires confrontation with powerful economic interests.

The abandonment of the 2035 ban is not just a policy failure. It is a moral one. It signals to future generations that even when faced with ecological collapse, Europe lacked the courage to break with the forces that caused it.

Electric is the future, as campaigners insist—not because it is convenient, but because there is no alternative. To retreat now is to choose managed decay over transformation, and denial over survival.