The feeling is that, one way or another, the European Commission will manage to find an exit strategy. It will not be an “exemption” for Gioia Tauro and the other ports put at risk by the ETS, but probably the implementation act currently under study that will defuse the time bomb of taxation on emissions starting from 1 January 2024.
The (legitimate) pressure coming from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Malta and Cyprus is too strong for the EU to carry on without any corrective action. The new measures, in fact, do not only threaten Gioia, which is in the company of Piraeus in Greece, Sines in Portugal, Algeciras and Valencia in Spain, Marsaxlokk in Malta.
She was the Dem MEP and vice-president of the European Parliament Pina Picierno to give a public outlet to one of the avenues that the technicians are studying: extending the treatment provided for by the European directive on polluting emissions from large ships also to the ports of North Africa. And not only in Port Said and Tanger Med, the two mega-structures in Egypt and Morocco immediately identified as an obvious basis for possible relocations of traffic (and not surprisingly already included in the list published in the Official Journal of the EU of “ports of transshipment of neighboring containers”).
“It can be done?” However, the regional commissioner of the League asks Giacomo Saccomanno, which expresses more than one doubt: “How can the EU require states not adhering to it to apply legislation issued by it?”. Doubts on the topic also from the commissioner of the Port Authority of Gioia, Andrea Agostinelli: “The real effectiveness of an intervention of this type needs to be evaluated.”
