Nothing stands in the way of Donald Trump’s comeback. Fortunately, we’re not talking about a return to the White House but to the online platform Twitter. In a vote, a majority had spoken out in favor of giving Trump access to his account again. Elon Musk respects the will of the majority. But Trump is hesitant. It’s quite possible that he no longer trusts Twitter services since the chaos regarding the checkmark. After all, Trump wants to have control over the fake news spread under his name.
The sleep deprivation of the night spent negotiating is followed by the COP 27 hangover. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expresses dissatisfaction with the meager results in Sharm el-Sheikh. “A small step towards climate justice was taken with COP27, but the planet needs much more,” she says. “We have treated a few symptoms, but not cured the patient of their fever.” Lukas Scheid sat through the last night of negotiations on the Red Sea and wrote up the results for us.
From Sharm el-Sheikh to space: Corinna Visser has been following up on the deal that EU co-legislators struck last week for a satellite-based secure communications network. Space Commissioner Thierry Breton has lined up €2.4 billion in budgetary funding for IRIS2, underlining his reputation as a doer: The agreement was reached in a record-breaking nine months.
Not Breton, but the Commissioner for the European Way of Life, Margaritis Schinas, is leaving for the World Cup in Qatar in the very first week. In today’s Apéro, Falk Steiner criticizes EU politicians’ handling of the sheikhs’ football event in the desert sand: lacking in credibility to a shocking degree.
Have a great start to the week!
Just a week ago – at the halfway point of COP27 – it was considered almost impossible that a fund for loss & damage would come to be. Now it has been decided and is to come next year. It is a historic decision, as developing countries have been calling for a financial instrument to address loss and damage resulting from climate change for 30 years. Christoph Bals, political director of Germanwatch called it an important breakthrough. He says the German government was instrumental in getting the EU and other industrialized countries to warm up to this fund.
The agreement on loss & damage at COP27 includes:
On Sunday night, there was still wrangling over whether only “particularly vulnerable” developing countries or all developing countries should be eligible to receive funds from the loss and damage financial instruments. A formulation that classified all developing countries as of 1992 as recipient countries was dropped shortly before the closing plenary of the COP.
Just as controversial was the question of who should provide the funding. The EU and later also some island states insisted that new financial sources must be found – so far, so vague. Originally, the EU demanded to expand the group of contributing countries. Thus, emerging economies that are now wealthy, such as China, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico and oil-rich nations, would also have had to pay into the fund. “The EU wanted to make China and the Gulf states contributors – but in the end, it didn’t have the courage for the necessary confrontation,” analyzes David Ryfisch, head of the International Climate Policy team at Germanwatch.
While the new formulation does not exclude the expansion of contributors, it is not particularly explicit either. It is now up to the transition committee to propose new funding sources for loss and damage. This means that the debate on whether China, as the historically second-largest emitter, must also bear responsibility for climate damage is by no means over, but merely postponed until COP28.
The roadmap for global greenhouse gas reductions was of enormous importance to Europeans at the COP. It was supposed to be an ambitious path to achieving the 1.5-degree target. But it falls short of many expectations. “In Glasgow, we were still able to maintain the 1.5. At this COP, we are at a juncture where it could lose,” said Franz Perrez, Switzerland’s chief negotiator.
The Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Work Program:
The industrialized countries would have preferred even more ambitious targets, which they, as the main emitters, would most likely have had to implement themselves. But even less ambitious targets would have been possible: An earlier version of the text stated that the work program must not lead to higher climate targets. An absolute no-go for the EU, which it also made clear to the Egyptian COP presidency. Without higher climate targets (NDCs), the 1.5-degree target would remain out of reach. The EU prevailed, but at what price?
The price may have been horse-trading, as the final text – called the cover decision – falls short of Glasgow and will likely be a bad memory of European negotiators for a long time to come.
The cover decision states:
The last point in particular leaves many questions unanswered because “low-emission” also means gas and nuclear power. EU climate commissioner Frans Timmermans said on Sunday that only gas with CO2 capture is considered “low-emission”. However, David Ryfisch of Germanwatch estimates that other countries will interpret the wording differently.
However, there are also positive signals from the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan. For example, the accelerated expansion of renewable energies in the Cover Decision is also considered progress in EU circles. What is not in the cover decision is much more important than what is in it:
An alliance of 80 countries (including the US, India and the EU) firmly tried to build on the ambitions shown in Glasgow on Saturday night. They explicitly called for a “phase-out” of all fossil fuels. But COP President Sameh Shoukry ignored the push, as opposition, particularly from oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia, was too strong. Instead, the presidency submitted the now-agreed text to a “take it or leave it” vote, says Christoph Bals. In the end, after a night of negotiations, at 7 a.m., none of the 80 countries voiced any objections.
Thierry Breton is right. This is record speed. After just nine months of deliberation, the Commission, Council and Parliament agreed late last week on a Union program for secure connectivity in space. IRIS2 stands for Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite. And the Commission has also put up its share of funding: €2.4 billion. That’s how fast it can happen when a commissioner, a rapporteur and a member state push European legislation.
With IRIS2, the Union is pursuing two goals:
This also makes it clear that the primary aim is to meet the state’s needs for secure communications and not to provide cheap Internet from space for everyone – as the shadow rapporteur for the Greens/EFA, Niklas Nienaß, had called for, for example. The BDI, on the other hand, welcomes the orientation. Matthias Wachter, BDI’s space expert, writes on LinkdIn that it is positive that IRIS2 is clearly focused on government and military needs, thus avoiding competition with commercial providers and crowding-out effects.
The French, Commissioner Breton and rapporteur Christophe Grudler (Renew) presumably also pursued their own goals: strengthening the existing French space industry – Airbus, Eutelsat. These companies are predestined candidates when it comes to launching satellites into space and setting up communications networks there. This explains why the French have pushed ahead with the project.
Germany’s focus is somewhat different. Germany is looking to build a new commercial space economy (New Space) away from established companies and space agencies. SMEs and startups should be able to compete with companies like Starlink. For example, in a joint letter with his Italian counterpart to Breton, German Economy Minister Robert Habeck (Green Party) wrote: “…and we see the complementary commercial opportunities this could create for the European space industry in the current climate of increased global competition.” The BDI, for example, is convinced that New Space could be the key to future technologies such as autonomous driving, Industry 4.0 or fast global Internet.
There are other reasons Breton has pressed the pace. If the plan works out for the Commission’s first in-orbit services to come online in 2024, Breton himself will still be able to get them up and running. But there are also weightier reasons:
Last but not least, IRIS2 is also intended to become a stimulus program for the European space economy. “In the rapidly changing market, it is important that the European space economy develops rapidly,” says Niklas Nienaß. In total, the estimated cost of the satellite constellation in space is around €6.5 billion.
In addition to the €2.4 billion from the EU, the rest of the money is to come from the European Space Agency (ESA) and its member states. This was another reason why haste was needed. Because at the ESA Council of Ministers CM22, which will take place in Paris on Nov. 22 and 23, the 22 member states will decide on the budget for the coming years. According to Nienaß, ESA is also planning to launch an additional program that will build on IRIS2 in order to offer further services, such as Internet from mid-Earth orbit.
The most significant points of contention, says Nienaß, have been in the negotiations over what role ESA and EUSPA will play in implementing the project. That’s because while ESA includes countries such as Switzerland, Norway and the United Kingdom, EUSPA is the EU’s space agency. “We pushed through the compromise that both would be involved,” Nienaß says.
This is of crucial importance. Because if rockets for IRIS2 were only allowed to be launched into space from EU territory, only the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana, 5,000 kilometers away and operated by the French space agency CNES, would come into consideration. This is where the Ariane and Vega rockets are launched.
However, heavy launchers like Ariane are not needed to transport small satellites, which enable numerous new business models at the interface between navigation, communication, earth observation and digitization. Rather, what is needed are micro launchers that launch further north. ESA members Norway and Scotland are working on this.
But a private consortium is active in Germany. It plans to launch micro launchers from aboard a special ship in the German Exclusive Economic Zone in the North Sea. Among others, the German space company OHB is involved in the German Offshore Spaceport Alliance.
And with more satellites being launched into space in the coming years than ever before, another aspect was important to the Greens: “We brought in sustainability criteria that everyone who wants to participate has to meet.” These criteria are:
The Commission now needs to concretize these criteria in a further legal act. Nienaß sees this as the first steps for a space traffic management system – and for an international space law. In any case, for a European space law. This will then apply to all those who want to offer services from space in the EU.
The political agreement reached in the trilogue still has to be formally adopted by the European Parliament and the Council.
The EU Commission wants to save media freedom in Europe – with a European supervisory authority. Spot the mistake.
But let’s start at the beginning: For years, there has been a decline in press freedom in some EU member states. Especially, but not only, in Hungary and in Poland independent media are under pressure. The Rule of Law Report and the EU’s Media Pluralism Monitor conclude that the freedom and independence of the media in the EU is at risk.
So there is a need for action. In response, the EU Commission has chosen a path that will achieve the opposite of what is necessary. Instead of countering those states that do not guarantee media freedom with the existing, quite sharp tools of EU law, a regulatory corset is to be put together for media everywhere in Europe. It is not only Germany that has criticized the proposed regulation, which the Commission presented in September. The draft is an “encroachment on the cultural and media sovereignty of the EU states that goes beyond the scope of their powers,” said State Secretary Heike Raab at the Media Days in Munich, and rightly so. A subsidiarity complaint is being discussed in the Bundesrat. German press publishers fear “political appropriation”.
In her State of the Union address, Commission President von der Leyen made an extensive announcement about the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) in 2021 and promised that the proposal would be published a year later. In the media environment, the plan has raised big question marks. Media regulation at the European level is tantamount to breaking a taboo of sorts. Until now, the EU had not ventured beyond regulating broadcasting, which is already intensively regulated at the member state level. For good reason: the treaties simply do not provide for EU competence for the media and especially the press. On the contrary, the member states have always understood the highly sensitive field of media policy as their sole competence. The EMFA, therefore, represents a paradigm shift.
The uproar in Germany is understandable for that reason alone. But the content of the Commission’s proposal also offers explosives in terms of media policy. In particular, the plans to create the “body,” a kind of European media supervisory authority, break with central principles of press freedom. For not only is this authority, which is to be created from the merger of the national media supervisory authorities of the member states, also to be responsible for the press. The EU Commission itself is also supposed to take over the management of this institution. This is an affront to the press, which in a modern democracy is responsible for its content before the law and judges alone, and for a good reason.
However, the body would not only mean that the press in Europe would be placed under official supervision for the first time but also that some countries viewed critically by the EU Commission would in future also be given powers for the entire European media landscape. For example, Hungarian and Polish media regulators would, in the future, also have a seat at the table when it comes to regulating German media. This highlights a major flaw in the overall project: Europe’s different media landscapes, which are characterized by linguistic, cultural and demographic differences, cannot be lumped together.
The immense problems in various EU member states must be solved, that is beyond question. But European media regulation is certainly not the right way to go about it. Precisely when it comes to protecting the freedom and diversity of the media, politics cannot afford to be overreaching. Neither the Commission nor the governments of the member states have exhausted their political options for action so far.
The Commission likes to portray the European Media Freedom Act as the last chance to turn things around, but that simply cannot be allowed to happen given the unambitious actions of the EU and its member states in the face of developments in their own ranks over the past decades. It is all about choosing your tools carefully. The EU must not undermine media freedom where it still exists.
Nothing stands in the way of Donald Trump’s comeback. Fortunately, we’re not talking about a return to the White House but to the online platform Twitter. In a vote, a majority had spoken out in favor of giving Trump access to his account again. Elon Musk respects the will of the majority. But Trump is hesitant. It’s quite possible that he no longer trusts Twitter services since the chaos regarding the checkmark. After all, Trump wants to have control over the fake news spread under his name.
The sleep deprivation of the night spent negotiating is followed by the COP 27 hangover. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expresses dissatisfaction with the meager results in Sharm el-Sheikh. “A small step towards climate justice was taken with COP27, but the planet needs much more,” she says. “We have treated a few symptoms, but not cured the patient of their fever.” Lukas Scheid sat through the last night of negotiations on the Red Sea and wrote up the results for us.
From Sharm el-Sheikh to space: Corinna Visser has been following up on the deal that EU co-legislators struck last week for a satellite-based secure communications network. Space Commissioner Thierry Breton has lined up €2.4 billion in budgetary funding for IRIS2, underlining his reputation as a doer: The agreement was reached in a record-breaking nine months.
Not Breton, but the Commissioner for the European Way of Life, Margaritis Schinas, is leaving for the World Cup in Qatar in the very first week. In today’s Apéro, Falk Steiner criticizes EU politicians’ handling of the sheikhs’ football event in the desert sand: lacking in credibility to a shocking degree.
Have a great start to the week!
Just a week ago – at the halfway point of COP27 – it was considered almost impossible that a fund for loss & damage would come to be. Now it has been decided and is to come next year. It is a historic decision, as developing countries have been calling for a financial instrument to address loss and damage resulting from climate change for 30 years. Christoph Bals, political director of Germanwatch called it an important breakthrough. He says the German government was instrumental in getting the EU and other industrialized countries to warm up to this fund.
The agreement on loss & damage at COP27 includes:
On Sunday night, there was still wrangling over whether only “particularly vulnerable” developing countries or all developing countries should be eligible to receive funds from the loss and damage financial instruments. A formulation that classified all developing countries as of 1992 as recipient countries was dropped shortly before the closing plenary of the COP.
Just as controversial was the question of who should provide the funding. The EU and later also some island states insisted that new financial sources must be found – so far, so vague. Originally, the EU demanded to expand the group of contributing countries. Thus, emerging economies that are now wealthy, such as China, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico and oil-rich nations, would also have had to pay into the fund. “The EU wanted to make China and the Gulf states contributors – but in the end, it didn’t have the courage for the necessary confrontation,” analyzes David Ryfisch, head of the International Climate Policy team at Germanwatch.
While the new formulation does not exclude the expansion of contributors, it is not particularly explicit either. It is now up to the transition committee to propose new funding sources for loss and damage. This means that the debate on whether China, as the historically second-largest emitter, must also bear responsibility for climate damage is by no means over, but merely postponed until COP28.
The roadmap for global greenhouse gas reductions was of enormous importance to Europeans at the COP. It was supposed to be an ambitious path to achieving the 1.5-degree target. But it falls short of many expectations. “In Glasgow, we were still able to maintain the 1.5. At this COP, we are at a juncture where it could lose,” said Franz Perrez, Switzerland’s chief negotiator.
The Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Work Program:
The industrialized countries would have preferred even more ambitious targets, which they, as the main emitters, would most likely have had to implement themselves. But even less ambitious targets would have been possible: An earlier version of the text stated that the work program must not lead to higher climate targets. An absolute no-go for the EU, which it also made clear to the Egyptian COP presidency. Without higher climate targets (NDCs), the 1.5-degree target would remain out of reach. The EU prevailed, but at what price?
The price may have been horse-trading, as the final text – called the cover decision – falls short of Glasgow and will likely be a bad memory of European negotiators for a long time to come.
The cover decision states:
The last point in particular leaves many questions unanswered because “low-emission” also means gas and nuclear power. EU climate commissioner Frans Timmermans said on Sunday that only gas with CO2 capture is considered “low-emission”. However, David Ryfisch of Germanwatch estimates that other countries will interpret the wording differently.
However, there are also positive signals from the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan. For example, the accelerated expansion of renewable energies in the Cover Decision is also considered progress in EU circles. What is not in the cover decision is much more important than what is in it:
An alliance of 80 countries (including the US, India and the EU) firmly tried to build on the ambitions shown in Glasgow on Saturday night. They explicitly called for a “phase-out” of all fossil fuels. But COP President Sameh Shoukry ignored the push, as opposition, particularly from oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia, was too strong. Instead, the presidency submitted the now-agreed text to a “take it or leave it” vote, says Christoph Bals. In the end, after a night of negotiations, at 7 a.m., none of the 80 countries voiced any objections.
Thierry Breton is right. This is record speed. After just nine months of deliberation, the Commission, Council and Parliament agreed late last week on a Union program for secure connectivity in space. IRIS2 stands for Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite. And the Commission has also put up its share of funding: €2.4 billion. That’s how fast it can happen when a commissioner, a rapporteur and a member state push European legislation.
With IRIS2, the Union is pursuing two goals:
This also makes it clear that the primary aim is to meet the state’s needs for secure communications and not to provide cheap Internet from space for everyone – as the shadow rapporteur for the Greens/EFA, Niklas Nienaß, had called for, for example. The BDI, on the other hand, welcomes the orientation. Matthias Wachter, BDI’s space expert, writes on LinkdIn that it is positive that IRIS2 is clearly focused on government and military needs, thus avoiding competition with commercial providers and crowding-out effects.
The French, Commissioner Breton and rapporteur Christophe Grudler (Renew) presumably also pursued their own goals: strengthening the existing French space industry – Airbus, Eutelsat. These companies are predestined candidates when it comes to launching satellites into space and setting up communications networks there. This explains why the French have pushed ahead with the project.
Germany’s focus is somewhat different. Germany is looking to build a new commercial space economy (New Space) away from established companies and space agencies. SMEs and startups should be able to compete with companies like Starlink. For example, in a joint letter with his Italian counterpart to Breton, German Economy Minister Robert Habeck (Green Party) wrote: “…and we see the complementary commercial opportunities this could create for the European space industry in the current climate of increased global competition.” The BDI, for example, is convinced that New Space could be the key to future technologies such as autonomous driving, Industry 4.0 or fast global Internet.
There are other reasons Breton has pressed the pace. If the plan works out for the Commission’s first in-orbit services to come online in 2024, Breton himself will still be able to get them up and running. But there are also weightier reasons:
Last but not least, IRIS2 is also intended to become a stimulus program for the European space economy. “In the rapidly changing market, it is important that the European space economy develops rapidly,” says Niklas Nienaß. In total, the estimated cost of the satellite constellation in space is around €6.5 billion.
In addition to the €2.4 billion from the EU, the rest of the money is to come from the European Space Agency (ESA) and its member states. This was another reason why haste was needed. Because at the ESA Council of Ministers CM22, which will take place in Paris on Nov. 22 and 23, the 22 member states will decide on the budget for the coming years. According to Nienaß, ESA is also planning to launch an additional program that will build on IRIS2 in order to offer further services, such as Internet from mid-Earth orbit.
The most significant points of contention, says Nienaß, have been in the negotiations over what role ESA and EUSPA will play in implementing the project. That’s because while ESA includes countries such as Switzerland, Norway and the United Kingdom, EUSPA is the EU’s space agency. “We pushed through the compromise that both would be involved,” Nienaß says.
This is of crucial importance. Because if rockets for IRIS2 were only allowed to be launched into space from EU territory, only the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana, 5,000 kilometers away and operated by the French space agency CNES, would come into consideration. This is where the Ariane and Vega rockets are launched.
However, heavy launchers like Ariane are not needed to transport small satellites, which enable numerous new business models at the interface between navigation, communication, earth observation and digitization. Rather, what is needed are micro launchers that launch further north. ESA members Norway and Scotland are working on this.
But a private consortium is active in Germany. It plans to launch micro launchers from aboard a special ship in the German Exclusive Economic Zone in the North Sea. Among others, the German space company OHB is involved in the German Offshore Spaceport Alliance.
And with more satellites being launched into space in the coming years than ever before, another aspect was important to the Greens: “We brought in sustainability criteria that everyone who wants to participate has to meet.” These criteria are:
The Commission now needs to concretize these criteria in a further legal act. Nienaß sees this as the first steps for a space traffic management system – and for an international space law. In any case, for a European space law. This will then apply to all those who want to offer services from space in the EU.
The political agreement reached in the trilogue still has to be formally adopted by the European Parliament and the Council.
The EU Commission wants to save media freedom in Europe – with a European supervisory authority. Spot the mistake.
But let’s start at the beginning: For years, there has been a decline in press freedom in some EU member states. Especially, but not only, in Hungary and in Poland independent media are under pressure. The Rule of Law Report and the EU’s Media Pluralism Monitor conclude that the freedom and independence of the media in the EU is at risk.
So there is a need for action. In response, the EU Commission has chosen a path that will achieve the opposite of what is necessary. Instead of countering those states that do not guarantee media freedom with the existing, quite sharp tools of EU law, a regulatory corset is to be put together for media everywhere in Europe. It is not only Germany that has criticized the proposed regulation, which the Commission presented in September. The draft is an “encroachment on the cultural and media sovereignty of the EU states that goes beyond the scope of their powers,” said State Secretary Heike Raab at the Media Days in Munich, and rightly so. A subsidiarity complaint is being discussed in the Bundesrat. German press publishers fear “political appropriation”.
In her State of the Union address, Commission President von der Leyen made an extensive announcement about the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) in 2021 and promised that the proposal would be published a year later. In the media environment, the plan has raised big question marks. Media regulation at the European level is tantamount to breaking a taboo of sorts. Until now, the EU had not ventured beyond regulating broadcasting, which is already intensively regulated at the member state level. For good reason: the treaties simply do not provide for EU competence for the media and especially the press. On the contrary, the member states have always understood the highly sensitive field of media policy as their sole competence. The EMFA, therefore, represents a paradigm shift.
The uproar in Germany is understandable for that reason alone. But the content of the Commission’s proposal also offers explosives in terms of media policy. In particular, the plans to create the “body,” a kind of European media supervisory authority, break with central principles of press freedom. For not only is this authority, which is to be created from the merger of the national media supervisory authorities of the member states, also to be responsible for the press. The EU Commission itself is also supposed to take over the management of this institution. This is an affront to the press, which in a modern democracy is responsible for its content before the law and judges alone, and for a good reason.
However, the body would not only mean that the press in Europe would be placed under official supervision for the first time but also that some countries viewed critically by the EU Commission would in future also be given powers for the entire European media landscape. For example, Hungarian and Polish media regulators would, in the future, also have a seat at the table when it comes to regulating German media. This highlights a major flaw in the overall project: Europe’s different media landscapes, which are characterized by linguistic, cultural and demographic differences, cannot be lumped together.
The immense problems in various EU member states must be solved, that is beyond question. But European media regulation is certainly not the right way to go about it. Precisely when it comes to protecting the freedom and diversity of the media, politics cannot afford to be overreaching. Neither the Commission nor the governments of the member states have exhausted their political options for action so far.
The Commission likes to portray the European Media Freedom Act as the last chance to turn things around, but that simply cannot be allowed to happen given the unambitious actions of the EU and its member states in the face of developments in their own ranks over the past decades. It is all about choosing your tools carefully. The EU must not undermine media freedom where it still exists.
