'Sustainable Finance Made by the EC' - Inconvenient Insights into An Unsustainable Economic Policy

The European Commission's (EU Commission) Sustainable Growth Action Programme aims to transform national economies in the European Union towards a Green Economy. This is linked to the aspiration to achieve the EU climate protection goals and the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. In order for the financial sector to fulfil this task, it is being subjected to a wave of "green regulations", the timing of which is not yet foreseeable. In the meantime, initial experience teaches that the financial sector is incurring enormous costs in the green transformation. On the other hand, the financial sector is beginning to commercially exploit the market opportunities of sustainable finance in its own way, including misguided developments such as greenwashing. The paper presents a critical examination of numerous implicit foundations and heroic assumptions of the Sustainable Finance Programme. It argues that the Sustainable Finance Programme and the sole addressing of the financial sector as responsible and enabler to achieve climate and sustainability goals is overstretched and misdirected. The entire economic policy approach is not rational, inefficient, too indirect and unable to achieve the set goals, let alone overcome crises.To begin with, the paper briefly reviews the core of the Sustainable Growth Action Programme and the regulatory strands that have emerged from it. Building on this, it will be shown that the Sustainable Finance Action Programme is in the tradition of dirigiste EU economic policy, which has already demonstrated its ineffectiveness in other policy areas such as agriculture for years. The "green investment governance" resulting from the programme is characterised by a political governance vacuum at the national policy level. It is filled, alongside the EU bodies, by lobbyist circles of a few states, non-governmental organisations and a powerful ecological-financial industrial complex. A political-economic analysis is provided on this. Whether green investments have a positive impact at all and thus enable the realisation of climate protection and sustainability goals is then critically questioned. Finally, it is argued why sustainable finance is likely to be incapable of overcoming the current and future systemic crises