The first effect will be felt starting from January 1st next year. When you stop your car at a petrol station, something will have changed. The price of diesel. It will be higher and refueling will therefore cost more if the car runs on a diesel engine. And gradually, from year to year and for ten years, the extra cents will increase, until they reach the same price as petrol, the green which today costs more than diesel. To understand how this change will take shape that will make diesel cars no longer convenient in terms of costs for refueling, you have to enter the rooms of the Ministry of the Environment. It is there that the owner Sergio Costa, wanted by the 5 stars, is carrying out a project that aims to cut a part of the so-called harmful environmental subsidies, a term which also includes the reduced rate on diesel.
The government plan
The work starts from afar because putting hand to harmful environmental subsidies yes responds to a logic of protection of the environment and health, but at the same time it affects benefits and concessions that are essential for sectors such as road transport. Many, in previous governments and with different shades, have tried. Nobody has succeeded. The operation is surgical, but very risky for the reasons mentioned above. Of the 19.8 billion in harmful subsidies provided by the state, 17.7 billion go to support the so-called fossil sources. And diesel is one of them. It absorbs most of the resources. Now the goal is to gradually raise the relative tax rate and bring it, in 2032, to the same level as that of petrol. We will start from the current gap (the excise tax on diesel is € 0.617 per liter, that on gasoline is € 0.728 per liter) and gradually we will proceed up to the final alignment.
The operational drop point of the intervention will materialize in a month, with the budget law, where the Ministry of the Environment aims to insert the cut of harmful environmental subsidies for a value that in 2032 will allow to recover 2.8 billion. Among these 2.67 billion will come from the cancellation of the difference between the rates of diesel and petrol.
The push of Grillo
Costa’s plan, which was chosen as the 5-star Minister of the Environment, points to the much-needed green change that the Movement is trying to put back at the center of its agenda. Covid has stunned many of the measures designed in this sense, starting with the introduction of the plastic tax that the government has decided to postpone to next year. And even green bonds have yet to take off. In M5s environments it is pointed out that it is no coincidence that Beppe Grillo has returned to push on renewables, precisely as an alternative to fossil fuels. The co-founder of the Movement sent an audio speech to the Senate on the occasion of the presentation of the rules that give condominiums and small and medium-sized enterprises the possibility of having an incentive to produce energy with renewable sources and consume it directly, without having to put it into the grid. And it is no coincidence that Grillo himself has embraced the same line that is at the basis of the ministry’s plan: “Energy from fossils must cost a lot, not a little, and all those taxes can be redistributed in support of renewables”. Costa’s plan, in fact, provides for a zero-balance and virtuous mechanism: the cut in harmful subsidies will be offset by environmentally favorable subsidies.
The resource target node
But what will become of the money that will be obtained from cutting subsidies harmful to the environment? The zero balance proposed by Costa implies that these same resources must be converted into green incentives, but the Minister of Economy Roberto Gualtieri has repeatedly repeated that those money are used to finance the tax reform to cut taxes. The question is still open. From the Ministry of the Environment they let it be known that the work in progress is not aimed at making cash, thus confirming that the savings will be immediately used in favor of all those who will be affected by the cut. The measures, in fact, will impact not only on the citizen who will go to refuel, but on the entire automotive sector. On the other hand, the road transport sector will be excluded, which nevertheless requires clarity. The associations representing this sector are on alert and ready to protest if the cut affects them. “If the cut in the excise duties on diesel will also affect us, then our answer can only be a stop of the road haulage, a strike”, says Paolo Uggè, president of Fai Conftrasporto.
The protest of the oil union
Those who are protesting are already the Petroleum Union, the association that brings together and represents the main companies operating in Italy in the field of processing, logistics and distribution of petroleum products and biofuels. “It seems to me that the government has already decided. I would like things to be said as they are and that is that the diesel driver will pay more for diesel, says the president Claudio Spinaci speaking to Radio 24. The government’s battle against diesel starts uphill.
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