The European Union is one of the few signatories to the 2015 Paris climate agreement that initially committed to binding limits on its carbon dioxide emissions, having promised to reduce them by 40% (and now 55%) from 1990 levels by 2030.

On July 14, the European Commission presented a comprehensive package of measures aimed at achieving massive reductions in EU firms’ and households’ CO2 emissions in the short term in order to meet the 55% target by 2030 and make the bloc carbon neutral by 2050.

Never before has the world seen a comparable effort to protect the environment. And rarely, except in wartime, have market economies been subjected to the sort of rigid central planning that the Commission now proposes.