Sebastian Mang, the climate and energy policy adviser for Greenpeace’s EU office and a contributor to the report, says that the level of industry influence exceeded anything that he’d witnessed before: “This [regulatory capture] does happen in other areas, but doesn’t usually happen with topics that are so important,” he says. “This time the process was particularly bad — it was incredible.”

At the same time that polluting companies were stacking the European Environment Agency’s working group to hamstring emissions controls, the same agency was warning that hundreds of thousands of Europeans would suffer a premature death due to air pollution if member states’ governments failed to act.

Imagine a midsize but significant European city, like Toulouse in France, Bratislava in Slovakia, Edinburgh or Liverpool in the U.K., or Gdańsk in Poland. Now imagine the entire population of one of those cities dying over the course of a year, and you’d still be underestimating — by a margin of tens of thousands — the number of people in Europe who die prematurely every year due to air pollution.

The number of EU residents who die each year due to air pollution is greater than the populations of various midsize European cities. Data: European Court of Auditors / Wikipedia.

According to a report from the European Court of Auditors, there are an estimated 510,000 premature deaths due to air pollution each year in the EU. That’s a huge number, and it makes air pollution the leading environmental cause of premature death in Europe by far — the toll is more than ten times higher than the number of deaths from road traffic accidents.

Given the striking figures, you might think that member states would do everything in their power to reduce the effects of a phenomenon that so drastically impacts the health of European citizens. And yet, national governments frequently conspire to block pollution restriction measures that would undeniably save lives.

Some nations are worse than others in this respect, and a select few appear time and time again on the list of anti-regulation advocates. The United Kingdom is one of them: in 2016, after the EU agreed to weaken air pollution targets for 2030, a diplomat told The Guardian that the U.K. had been instrumental in building a coalition of some of the worst polluters to resist the proposal.

Poland has also been particularly active on the same front, launching legal action against the European Commission in March, 2018, with the aim of challenging air pollution standards for large power stations. The action was supported by Bulgaria, which had the worst air quality in Europe in 2013 but was later beaten on that count by Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Republic of Macedonia.

Resistance to these policy solutions seems reprehensible on its own, but it’s not the end of the story. To add insult to injury, not only does a core group of countries consistently try to block regulation, but the countries with the highest rates of emissions collectively spend billions of euros each year on subsidizing the coal industry, actively helping polluting companies stay in business.

A report from the Overseas Development Institute, a nonpartisan global think tank, found that from 2005–2016, the 10 countries which produce 84 percent of Europe’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions gave an average of €6.3 billion per year in subsidies to coal. All of the countries — Germany, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, the U.K., Greece, Czechia, Hungary, Italy and France — gave some form of tax break to companies involved in the various stages of the coal supply chain, including mining, processing/refining, and power plant operation, all of which reduce the cost of using coal as an energy source.