Environmental common interest? Incorporating the Green Deal’s environmental objectives into State aid compatibility criteria

The deepening climate crisis and the gaining momentum of the European Green Deal initiative provide a canvas for this paper, which seeks to determine how environmental objectives can and should be incorporated into State aid. The author argues that the role of State aid law cannot be limited to protecting competitive processes because, since aid measures inherently distort the market, there must be something relevant to the European Union achieved in return for them to be allowed. While the author argues, due to the cross-cutting nature of environmental goals, for their incorporation into Article 107(3)(c) TFEU aid compatibility criteria, in a similar manner to how the pursuit of “common interest” was originally envisaged in the State Aid Modernisation initiative, the paper will also discuss the challenges associated with such incorporation concerning the interpretation of vague objectives and their transformation into actionable legal criteria.