Back in 2019, in her bid to become the next president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen stressed the importance for Europe to “lead the transition to a healthy planet and a new digital world.” Accordingly, ‘The European Green Deal’ and ‘A Europe fit for the digital age’ became two of the top priorities of the Commission that von der Leyen presided over, from 2019 to 2024.
The European Green Deal aims to make Europe “the first climate-neutral continent by becoming a modern, resource-efficient economy.” This has led to various policy initiatives in terms of climate neutrality and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions; sustainable use of resources and energy; restoration and protection of biodiversity; promotion and adoption of green technologies; and mitigation and adaptation measures to combat climate change.
In parallel, ‘A Europe fit for the digital age’ strategy has been designed to “empower people with a new generation of technologies.” Concretely, it aimed to “end the far-west” in the digital sphere by attempting to make sure that everyone could compete in and/or benefit from the digital economy, while protecting basic human rights online. The implicit goal is also to try and catch up with the US and China by changing the rules of the game, betting on the ‘Brussels Effect’ for these rules to become global. This has translated into the adoption of a wide range of ambitious policy instruments and initiatives: DMA, DSA, the Data Act, the AI Act, etc.
“No Green without Digital” and Vice-versa
At the EU level, these digital and green agendas were not only presented as naturally compatible, but also as inextricably linked, an idea summed up as “twin transitions.” On one hand, EU officials are convinced that “there is no Green Deal without digital,” explained an official working for the European Commission Vice President overseeing the Green Deal in 2021. Thanks to digital technologies, specific processes, as well as industries at large, could be dematerialized (at least, partly), enhancing energy and resource efficiency, and enabling closer monitoring. According to the same European official, “the digital is a big weapon—if not the biggest weapon—to help us achieve our climate goals.”
The digital transition is actually making the EU even less sustainable, while the green transition has only ended up favoring Big Tech.
On the other hand, the opposite is also held to be true (although less often emphasized in the dominant discourse): the digital transition itself needs to be green in order to be sustainable. At the very least, this means trying to reach climate neutrality for the tech sector and favoring a more responsible use of resources and energy in the digital sphere. One could even argue that the greening of digital technologies could also help foster the EU’s stated digital agenda by favoring more accountable, manageable, and even “sovereign” technologies over mostly US-based, hyper-concentrated, and data-hungry technologies that currently dominate the digital landscape.
Unfortunately, a quick look at concrete EU policies in the last five years shows that rather than being reciprocally supportive, the digital and green agendas are riddled with contradictions, both among and between them. To put it bluntly, the digital transition is actually making the EU even less sustainable, while the green transition has only ended up favoring Big Tech. The key reason for this lies in the EU’s refusal to envisage any measure that could deter growth. On the contrary, in line with the EU’s deep neoliberal core, both transitions are highly market-oriented, and only further profit opportunities for corporations, making their stated objectives and purposed interdependence largely unattainable.
Taking the Digital Demand for Granted
The EU’s Critical Raw Material Act (CRMA) is an excellent case in point of how this contradiction plays out. Adopted in early 2024, this piece of legislation is presented as an important pillar of the region’s Green Deal Industrial Plan. The plan’s goal is “to ensure the EU’s access to a secure, diversified, affordable and sustainable supply of critical raw materials.” According to President von der Leyen, this goal is all the more crucial as “raw materials are vital for manufacturing key technologies for our twin transition – like wind power generation, hydrogen storage or batteries.” However, the problem is that the extraction and processing of those raw materials have a huge environmental impact to start with, while the products and services they help develop aren’t necessarily ecologically friendly, to say the least.
Yet, the main concern of the CRMA is to secure the ‘supply’ of raw materials, without ever questioning the exponential and unsustainable growth of their ‘demand.’ To do this, the text makes it easier to open new mines or processing facilities in Europe, for example, while also aiming at multiplying partnerships and agreements with foreign countries, notably in the framework of the Global Gateway Strategy, spanning accusations of internal and external “green colonialism.” To be fair, a third pillar of the CRMA is devoted to “improving circularity and sustainability of raw materials,” but not only is this pillar comparatively small and vague compared to the others, it is also based on a ‘soft’ conception of circularity that mostly relies on two of the famous ‘three Rs’ of circularity, i.e., ‘Reuse’ and ‘Recycle,’ while forgetting the first and arguably most important one: ‘Reduce.’
The greening of digital technologies could help reinforce Europe’s stated willingness to rein in the power of Big Tech monopolies by favoring a digitalization process that is more transparent, accountable, manageable, decentralized, and so on.
Similar concerns have been raised regarding the European Chips Act, adopted to “bolster Europe’s competitiveness and resilience in semiconductor technologies and applications, and help achieve both the digital and green transition.” According to journalist Luca Bertuzzi, “the legislative proposal only considers the environmental impact based on the final product’s performance, in other words, how new generations of chips tend to enable more energy-efficient connected devices, power electronics, and ICT infrastructure.” However again, manufacturing chips is in itself an activity that has a high environmental impact—“the lion’s share of the computer sector’s environmental footprint,” according to a Harvard study. Furthermore, all chips are far from being used to improve the overall sustainability of the economy, rather quite the contrary. For instance, consider personalized ads or high-frequency trading. This led Bertuzzi to conclude that, “As far as chip manufacturing is concerned, the notion of digital sovereignty might not be immediately reconcilable with Europe’s green agenda.”
Big Tech to the Rescue
So, the EU’s digital agenda is not necessarily green. But what about the other way around? As mentioned, the greening of digital technologies could help reinforce Europe’s stated willingness to rein in the power of Big Tech monopolies by favoring a digitalization process that is more transparent, accountable, manageable, decentralized, and so on. Instead, the EU is (naively?) betting on the very same Big Tech monopolies it pretends to combat to help it realize its “green transition.” On 19 March 2021, a group of 26 CEOs from the tech sector signed a Declaration founding the ‘European Green Digital Coalition (EGDC),’ an initiative “supported by the European Commission and the European Parliament, based on the request of the EU Council, which aims to harness the enabling emission-reducing potential of digital solutions to all other sectors.”
The current “twin transitions” narrative in the EU is thus largely a fraudulent one, given the unwillingness of the Commission, and most EU leaders to even begin to question the capitalist and neoliberal orientation of the European economy.
Among the current members (now 37), we find not only European but also major US Big Tech monopolies, such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Uber. These are the very same corporations driving a worldwide digitalization process that is environmentally, democratically, socially, and even economically, destructive. This is what led the EU to adopt its digital agenda in the first place, including regulations, and now probes, directly targeting Google and Uber, for example. However, when it comes to the Green Deal, suddenly these corporations are welcome (and even funded by the EU) to come up with “deployment guidelines to provide recommendations for green digital transformation” in six priority sectors: Energy/Power, Transport, Construction/Buildings, Smart Cities, Manufacturing, and Agriculture.
As these examples show, the current “twin transitions” narrative in the EU is thus largely a fraudulent one, given the unwillingness of the Commission, and most EU leaders to even begin to question the capitalist and neoliberal orientation of the European economy. Although real progress has been made vis-à-vis the regulation of the digital sector, its unsustainable growth is still taken for granted, resulting in the perpetuation of an ecological plunder that mostly impacts the Global South. On the other way around, the hope of finding mostly technological—and profitable—solutions to the ecological crisis is resulting in the EU actually increasing its dependence on Big Tech, including on US-based organizations.
Is there any chance the next Commission could reverse this trend? Unfortunately, it seems improbable given the latest polls showing a dramatic surge in favor of right-wing forces in the upcoming European elections. For one thing, although divided, Europe’s right-wing parties generally share a common disdain for environmental issues, let alone any form of ‘just transition.’ And while some of them may embrace the idea of ‘digital sovereignty,’ it is certainly not in a way that progressive movements could and should embrace it.
However, this should not be a cause for despair. On the contrary, it means that an offensive movement in favor of digital and environmental (and also social, racial, and gender) justice is all the more necessary, both in the EU and worldwide.
