ANTWERP, Belgium — Ursula von der Leyen has come to the defense of the European Union’s embattled carbon market, hitting back at complaints that the bloc’s flagship climate policy is threatening factories and jobs.
But the European Commission president immediately faced a counterpush from the leaders of Germany and France, who suggested that high carbon prices were a problem, and further industry demands to bring down carbon costs.
On Wednesday, at a gathering in Antwerp, industry CEOs issued a fresh set of demands for European policymakers to ease regulation. Such calls tend to find a sympathetic ear in Brussels, with von der Leyen overseeing a massive deregulation drive and other policy changes in response to industry criticism.
But when manufacturers and leaders piled pressure on the Commission to take an ax to its bedrock climate policy — the Emissions Trading System, a carbon market that regulates around half the bloc’s planet-warming pollution — von der Leyen pushed back.
