7 July 2026 — CBAM expansion to everyday products: a committee of the European Parliament has given the green light, and millions of consumers as well as thousands of SMEs will be left with the bill. EUROFER’s number games: 30,000 jobs and 30 million tonnes. Neither claim holds up.
CBAM Expansion to Everyday Products: ENVI Committee Votes for the Next Cost Wave
A committee of the European Parliament has given the green light, and millions of consumers as well as thousands of SMEs will be left with the bill.
CBAM Expansions: What Really Happened
First, a necessary correction: contrary to some reporting, the full European Parliament has not approved the CBAM expansion. It was the Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, ENVI, that approved the draft report on extending CBAM to downstream products. 70% of committee members voted in favour of higher costs for EU citizens and companies. The plenary has not yet decided.
That does not change the direction of travel, however. Anyone familiar with the political dynamics in Brussels knows that ENVI decisions usually find their way into the plenary.
What Is Actually on the Table
The expansion is massive. In addition to the existing CBAM sectors, downstream products imported into the EU are also set to be charged with CO2 costs in the future: cars, washing machines, refrigerators, furniture, heating systems, building materials, agricultural machinery.
As early as 12 June 2026, the European Council had formulated a corresponding position. Council and ENVI are therefore moving in the same direction.
Inconsistency as a System: ACEA Asks Uncomfortable Questions
The reaction from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, ACEA, shows that the expansion plan has serious technical flaws. In a statement dated 6 July 2026, ACEA openly criticized that it remains entirely unclear why certain products were included and others were not. The Commission’s methodology may be theoretically understandable, but the calculation details explaining why certain automotive products were included and others were not are missing.
Among other things, ACEA is calling for passenger cars to be excluded from the expansion, for implementation to be postponed until 2030 at the earliest, and for simplified thresholds for large importers with complex supply chains. The association also warns of a serious shortage of accredited verifiers, which would make an expansion from as early as 2028 practically impossible.
In short: even those industries that generally accept CBAM consider the planned expansion rushed, inconsistent, and impossible to implement in its proposed form.
The Cost Calculation for Citizens and SMEs
The expansion is expected to take effect from 2028. The CO2 price currently stands at around EUR 80 per tonne. Projections point to EUR 140 by 2030 and up to EUR 250 by 2045.
What this means: imported everyday goods will systematically become more expensive. SMEs that depend on imported inputs or capital goods will face more bureaucracy, higher procurement costs, and declining competitiveness. Once again, there is no compensation mechanism. Once again, there is no serious impact assessment for medium-sized businesses.
The Real Question Nobody Is Asking
At the same time, the European steel sector is sitting on almost 700 million tonnes of accumulated free ETS certificates, with a current market value of around EUR 56 billion. These large producers can cushion their CO2 cost pressure for years, while importers and processors carry the full CBAM burden.
An expansion to everyday products does not resolve this asymmetry. It makes it worse. CBAM becomes an instrument that burdens consumers, fuels inflation, and cements structural competitive advantages for vertically integrated large corporations. And when even the automotive industry describes the expansion as inconsistent and technically flawed, that should be warning enough.
EUROFER’s Numbers Game: 30,000 Jobs and 30 Million Tonnes – Neither Claim Holds Up
In its latest statement on the new steel protection regime, EUROFER claims that the European steel industry has lost more than 30 million tonnes of production capacity and around 30,000 direct jobs over the past five years. Neither claim is correct in this form.
The Job Losses Are Simply Wrong
The employment figures: based on EUROFER’s own employment data from 2021 to 2025, the actual decline amounts to around 17,000 jobs, not 30,000. EUROFER had already used incorrect employment figures in a similar manner in previous campaigns, without ever providing reliable evidence to back them up.
Crude Steel Capacity Has Been Stable for Years
The capacity lie: there can likewise be no talk of a loss of production capacity in the technical sense. What actually declined was crude steel production, not installed capacity. The OECD Steel Outlook 2026 makes this unmistakably clear, as do EUROFER’s own figures in European Steel in Figures 2026.
Crude Steel Production Reduced, Slabs Imported Instead
The reason is known and is deliberately concealed by EUROFER: European producers reduced crude steel production and instead imported large quantities of slabs from Russia, China, Brazil, and Indonesia in order to secure downstream processing margins. At the same time, they either sold free ETS certificates or held them back for higher CO2 prices instead of investing in genuine capacity security.
Socialist Propaganda for More Subsidies and Protection
Thirty million tonnes of lost capacity sounds like industrial decline. The reality is an industry that speculates with state-subsidized certificates and aligns production decisions with import substitution and return maximization, while politically deploying crisis rhetoric to justify protective tariffs that cost others their competitiveness.
Another example of the dishonest socialist propaganda of European functionaries.
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