Combating climate change and its effects with gigantic mirrors that deflect sunlight back into the atmosphere, or injections of aerosols into the stratosphere that reduce the transmission of sunlight: what sounds like science fiction at the moment could one day become reality. Research into such methods has been going on for a long time. However, there are also risks involved in geoengineering the atmosphere.
The EU Commission wants to introduce risks from such interventions into the debate on global warming and how to combat it. It will announce today a legal framework for assessing the security implications of global warming. It’s about preventing conflict and large-scale migration due to water and food shortages. And this precisely includes assessing potential dangers from artificial interventions in the atmosphere.
A comprehensive debate and assessment is also called for by the scientific community in particular. It is true that researchers from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) recognize the change in solar radiation as the “only option that could cool the planet within a few years”. But they also point to dangers of the technology. Among them: Possible destruction of the ozone layer, local overcompensation for climate change, and risks to people and ecosystems. In addition, they put the cost at “tens of billions of US dollars per year per one degree of cooling” – costs for possible damages are not included.
The announcement of a legal framework to evaluate the pros and cons of climate engineering: This is the global prelude to regulating such novel methods – long before they reach a practical stage.
I wish you an exciting read.
The mood was charged, the room packed: The Environment (ENVI) Committee voted against the Nature Restoration Law in the final vote yesterday (Tuesday). The vote was a tie (44-44). Thus, the Committee recommends a rejection of the entire bill in the plenary of the European Parliament.
There had already been a vote in the Environment Committee in mid-June, but the turbulent session had to be interrupted. The motion to reject the entire proposal, which had previously been introduced by the EPP, had not received a majority.
Now, for supporters and opponents of the law, it will be a matter of organizing a majority in the European Parliament for their goal. And this is in a politically tense situation, in which both sides accuse each other of “fake news” and “election manipulation”.
Even the date for the vote in the Parliament is up for debate: The EPP wants a vote in September, because of an already “full political” agenda, while Renew, S&D, Greens and Left argue for a vote in the next plenary session, probably on July 11.
A different text will be put to the vote in plenary than the one rejected in committee yesterday. Supporters of the text hope that on July 11, Parliament will vote against this rejection and in favor of a new negotiating text that has yet to be drafted. This would include elements of the compromise negotiated in Parliament until the EPP left, as well as elements of the text adopted in the Environment Council on June 20.
Rapporteur César Luena (S&D) announced that the text would be one of the priorities of the Spanish Presidency. The current Spanish government is a strong supporter of the text – but the elections that will take place in Spain on July 23 could once again change the political situation fundamentally.
It is the first time that the Parliament’s Environment Committee has rejected a Green Deal proposal. Previously, the two associated committees on agriculture and fisheries had already rejected the text. The Green Deal is the prestige project of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She is therefore following the votes on the renaturation law “very closely”, a commission spokesman said yesterday. The Commission declines to comment on the environment committee because “the parliamentary process has not yet been completed”.
Frans Timmermans, Vice-President of the EU Commission and responsible for the Green Deal, has repeatedly stressed that the Commission will not present any other legislative proposal. But that is exactly what the EPP wants. Instead, the Commission spokesman repeated that Timmermans is ready to renegotiate “line by line” the current text.
Luena appealed to Commission President von der Leyen, calling on her to stop the “machinations” of EPP leader Manfred Weber, who wants to annul the text in its current form, until the next plenary session. He said there was “an intense struggle” within the EPP between Weber’s camp on the one hand and von der Leyen’s on the other, although they belonged to the same party.
Tuesday’s vote took place in a heated political atmosphere marked by hostility to the bill. Luena and ENVI Chairman Pascal Canfin (Renew) accused the EPP of watering down the law and teaming up with far-right parties to make it fail. “Many lies and false claims have been spread about this law”, Luena said. “In political struggle, you have to argue with data, with knowledge, with ideas, but not with lies.”
Canfin accused Weber of replacing “one-third” of the conservative members on the ENVI committee with “conservation-skeptical” legislators in order to get the bill rejected. “This was a very clear manipulation of the ENVI vote”, Canfin said. “It can’t happen in plenary, because Manfred Weber can’t replace members in plenary.” As chairman of a committee, it is “very appalling” to see that a political group is able to “manipulate to this extent”, he added.
Christine Schneider and Peter Liese (CDU) hit back, calling Canfin’s remarks “shocking” and “unacceptable”. Canfin was the “worst and most partisan” chairman of the ENVI committee he had seen since 1994, Liese said. “This has never happened before.”
Liese admitted that his party had made “many substitutions” during the vote because “we wanted to be on the safe side”. He said his Czech colleague Stanislav Polčák was the only one who had expressed a desire to vote for the law. Polčák did not participate in Tuesday’s vote.
“Our problems with the law are still the same”, Schneider said, calling the text “impractical, backward-looking and ideologically programmed”. She maintained her position that the EU Commission had taken “a completely wrong approach” to this law. It would lead to a decline in agricultural and forestry land and thus endanger food security, she warned.
The EU Commission has presented new criteria for the green taxonomy as part of a legislative package on sustainable finance. In doing so, it is adding to the catalog of economic activities that are considered sustainable under this classification system and should thus attract climate- and environmentally-friendly investments. These were previously developed by the Sustainable Finance Platform, the Commission’s advisory body.
For the EU green taxonomy, the Commission had so far adopted delegated acts on the two climate-related objectives and on natural gas and nuclear power. It is now proposing further taxonomy criteria for economic activities that make a significant contribution to one or more of the remaining four (non-climate-related) objectives:
In addition, the Commission has adopted amendments to the delegated act on the EU climate taxonomy. These expand the range of economic activities that contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation and were not previously covered by the taxonomy. These include, in particular, the manufacturing and transport sectors.
Among others, the following economic activities are to fall within the EU taxonomy under certain criteria:
All economic activities are subject to the “Do No Significant Harm” criteria, according to which each activity must make a substantial contribution to at least one environmental objective and not harm any of the other objectives. In addition, the legal acts prescribe a number of specific technical criteria for each individual activity.
For example, listed accommodation activities are expected to make a significant contribution to the protection and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems (and must not harm any of the other objectives). This ranges from hotels to vacation rentals and youth hostels to bivouac sites in the forest, provided that the operations are certified by an environmental impact assessment (EIA) and meet certain minimum standards of environmental impact and sustainability.
For example, operators of activities to conserve and restore habitats, ecosystems, and species must be independently certified and must implement a management plan on a 10-year cycle.
For the production of plastic packaging, adjustments had been called for in the Commission’s public consultation. Stakeholders had suggested that the criteria of the taxonomy should be adapted to other EU legislation: for example, to the revision of the Packaging Regulation currently under negotiation, the Water Framework Directive or the Ecodesign Directive, which is also currently being revised.
Now, stricter criteria apply to plastic packaging in the taxonomy than those in the upcoming revised legislation. These relate to the use of recyclate, ecodesign and the recyclability of the product. The proportion of recyclate in packaging, for example, must be at least 35 percent (for non-touch packaging) by 2028 under the taxonomy, with a target of ten percent for touch-sensitive packaging (such as for food). From 2028, these values will be increased to 65 and 50 percent, respectively. The Commission’s draft Packaging Regulation provides for a minimum value of up to 35 percent from 2030 and up to 65 percent from 2040.
Reactions to the delegated acts were mostly positive. The Federal Association of the German Waste Management, Water and Environmental Service Industries (BDE) stated that the EU Taxonomy Regulation was a “proper and sensible instrument for more sustainability”. It was particularly pleasing that the circular economy was explicitly mentioned. From the association’s point of view, it is regrettable that waste-to-energy has not yet been considered as a sustainable activity, as it makes an important contribution to the environmental objectives of the taxonomy as a pollutant sink for hazardous substances in waste and through the recovery of metals.
In a statement, the climate think tank E3G criticizes that some activities originally proposed by the Sustainable Finance Platform were not included in the Commission proposal. These included, in particular, sectors with high environmental impacts such as chemicals, textiles, agriculture and fisheries. “For these, science-based, ambitious criteria should be developed and included in the taxonomy”, writes E3G’s Tsvetelina Kuzmanova. Similarly, existing weak criteria, such as those for the forestry sector, should also have been improved.
The delegated acts will now be submitted to the Parliament and Council for a two-month review and are expected to enter into force from January 2024.
Whether the leap from Rotenburg to far-away Brussels was difficult? For Jan-Christoph Oetjen, who has been sitting in the European Parliament for the Liberal Group since 2019, the distance wasn’t too great: “Here, in terms of working methods, you’re actually close to local politics.” And that’s just the way the 45-year-old likes it: “Party politics play a subordinate role, new majorities are always formed, you can make things happen crosswise.”
This requires a different task profile than in the state parliament in Lower Saxony, which is characterized by the tension between government and opposition. In addition to his ongoing involvement in local politics, Oetjen was re-elected to the state parliament three times for the FDP between 2003 and 2019.
But the dimensions have changed since those days. Compared to the state parliament of Lower Saxony, the European Parliament is “so big that I really got lost on my way back to the office at the beginning”, Oetjen says. And: The scope of the decisions is different. Most recently, he sensed this with the issue of the CO2 emission standards for passenger cars, which was an extraordinary situation for him, Vice Chairman of the Transport Committee.
Oetjen counters the critics of e-fuels by saying that it is true that cars can be operated most efficiently electrically and that electric cars will therefore play a central role. However, it must be kept in mind that the expansion of the relevant infrastructure must be implemented not only in Germany and France, but also in northern Finland, Romania and La Réunion. Oetjen is not sure whether this is feasible by 2035.
Oetjen is also skeptical about the extent to which it will be possible to negotiate politically which technologies will be future-oriented. E-fuels will continue to be produced in any case; that is guaranteed by the demand from shipping and aviation alone. If there is a supply for passenger cars that does not find any customers – for example, because the costs are too high or the efficiency is too low – then that would not be a loss: “Then it was not a political decision, it was decided by the citizens through their consumption.”
Oetjen can boil down the basic features of an innovative transport concept for Europe to three key words: “digital, borderless, sustainable”. It is a matter of great concern to him that, especially in questions of mobility, thinking beyond national borders should come to an end. Here, he says, there are tasks that show that gaps have remained in Europe: “There are fewer bridges between Baden-Württemberg and Alsace today than before the First World War, and where there are no bridges, there is no traffic.”
That’s why Oetjen is enthusiastic about concepts that want to make tickets for mobility services bookable across national borders, in which everything from e-scooters to long-distance trains are brought together in an app, regardless of location. After all, low-threshold exchange opportunities are essential for the success of the European project.
Oetjen himself was sent by train to France for a school exchange at the age of 13, and has been an avowed European ever since. Today, he is married to a French woman, and their children are growing up in two cultures. The mission for the future is clear in Oetjen’s mind: “That will remain one of the main tasks – to bring Europe to life.” Julius Schwarzwälder
Combating climate change and its effects with gigantic mirrors that deflect sunlight back into the atmosphere, or injections of aerosols into the stratosphere that reduce the transmission of sunlight: what sounds like science fiction at the moment could one day become reality. Research into such methods has been going on for a long time. However, there are also risks involved in geoengineering the atmosphere.
The EU Commission wants to introduce risks from such interventions into the debate on global warming and how to combat it. It will announce today a legal framework for assessing the security implications of global warming. It’s about preventing conflict and large-scale migration due to water and food shortages. And this precisely includes assessing potential dangers from artificial interventions in the atmosphere.
A comprehensive debate and assessment is also called for by the scientific community in particular. It is true that researchers from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) recognize the change in solar radiation as the “only option that could cool the planet within a few years”. But they also point to dangers of the technology. Among them: Possible destruction of the ozone layer, local overcompensation for climate change, and risks to people and ecosystems. In addition, they put the cost at “tens of billions of US dollars per year per one degree of cooling” – costs for possible damages are not included.
The announcement of a legal framework to evaluate the pros and cons of climate engineering: This is the global prelude to regulating such novel methods – long before they reach a practical stage.
I wish you an exciting read.
The mood was charged, the room packed: The Environment (ENVI) Committee voted against the Nature Restoration Law in the final vote yesterday (Tuesday). The vote was a tie (44-44). Thus, the Committee recommends a rejection of the entire bill in the plenary of the European Parliament.
There had already been a vote in the Environment Committee in mid-June, but the turbulent session had to be interrupted. The motion to reject the entire proposal, which had previously been introduced by the EPP, had not received a majority.
Now, for supporters and opponents of the law, it will be a matter of organizing a majority in the European Parliament for their goal. And this is in a politically tense situation, in which both sides accuse each other of “fake news” and “election manipulation”.
Even the date for the vote in the Parliament is up for debate: The EPP wants a vote in September, because of an already “full political” agenda, while Renew, S&D, Greens and Left argue for a vote in the next plenary session, probably on July 11.
A different text will be put to the vote in plenary than the one rejected in committee yesterday. Supporters of the text hope that on July 11, Parliament will vote against this rejection and in favor of a new negotiating text that has yet to be drafted. This would include elements of the compromise negotiated in Parliament until the EPP left, as well as elements of the text adopted in the Environment Council on June 20.
Rapporteur César Luena (S&D) announced that the text would be one of the priorities of the Spanish Presidency. The current Spanish government is a strong supporter of the text – but the elections that will take place in Spain on July 23 could once again change the political situation fundamentally.
It is the first time that the Parliament’s Environment Committee has rejected a Green Deal proposal. Previously, the two associated committees on agriculture and fisheries had already rejected the text. The Green Deal is the prestige project of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She is therefore following the votes on the renaturation law “very closely”, a commission spokesman said yesterday. The Commission declines to comment on the environment committee because “the parliamentary process has not yet been completed”.
Frans Timmermans, Vice-President of the EU Commission and responsible for the Green Deal, has repeatedly stressed that the Commission will not present any other legislative proposal. But that is exactly what the EPP wants. Instead, the Commission spokesman repeated that Timmermans is ready to renegotiate “line by line” the current text.
Luena appealed to Commission President von der Leyen, calling on her to stop the “machinations” of EPP leader Manfred Weber, who wants to annul the text in its current form, until the next plenary session. He said there was “an intense struggle” within the EPP between Weber’s camp on the one hand and von der Leyen’s on the other, although they belonged to the same party.
Tuesday’s vote took place in a heated political atmosphere marked by hostility to the bill. Luena and ENVI Chairman Pascal Canfin (Renew) accused the EPP of watering down the law and teaming up with far-right parties to make it fail. “Many lies and false claims have been spread about this law”, Luena said. “In political struggle, you have to argue with data, with knowledge, with ideas, but not with lies.”
Canfin accused Weber of replacing “one-third” of the conservative members on the ENVI committee with “conservation-skeptical” legislators in order to get the bill rejected. “This was a very clear manipulation of the ENVI vote”, Canfin said. “It can’t happen in plenary, because Manfred Weber can’t replace members in plenary.” As chairman of a committee, it is “very appalling” to see that a political group is able to “manipulate to this extent”, he added.
Christine Schneider and Peter Liese (CDU) hit back, calling Canfin’s remarks “shocking” and “unacceptable”. Canfin was the “worst and most partisan” chairman of the ENVI committee he had seen since 1994, Liese said. “This has never happened before.”
Liese admitted that his party had made “many substitutions” during the vote because “we wanted to be on the safe side”. He said his Czech colleague Stanislav Polčák was the only one who had expressed a desire to vote for the law. Polčák did not participate in Tuesday’s vote.
“Our problems with the law are still the same”, Schneider said, calling the text “impractical, backward-looking and ideologically programmed”. She maintained her position that the EU Commission had taken “a completely wrong approach” to this law. It would lead to a decline in agricultural and forestry land and thus endanger food security, she warned.
The EU Commission has presented new criteria for the green taxonomy as part of a legislative package on sustainable finance. In doing so, it is adding to the catalog of economic activities that are considered sustainable under this classification system and should thus attract climate- and environmentally-friendly investments. These were previously developed by the Sustainable Finance Platform, the Commission’s advisory body.
For the EU green taxonomy, the Commission had so far adopted delegated acts on the two climate-related objectives and on natural gas and nuclear power. It is now proposing further taxonomy criteria for economic activities that make a significant contribution to one or more of the remaining four (non-climate-related) objectives:
In addition, the Commission has adopted amendments to the delegated act on the EU climate taxonomy. These expand the range of economic activities that contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation and were not previously covered by the taxonomy. These include, in particular, the manufacturing and transport sectors.
Among others, the following economic activities are to fall within the EU taxonomy under certain criteria:
All economic activities are subject to the “Do No Significant Harm” criteria, according to which each activity must make a substantial contribution to at least one environmental objective and not harm any of the other objectives. In addition, the legal acts prescribe a number of specific technical criteria for each individual activity.
For example, listed accommodation activities are expected to make a significant contribution to the protection and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems (and must not harm any of the other objectives). This ranges from hotels to vacation rentals and youth hostels to bivouac sites in the forest, provided that the operations are certified by an environmental impact assessment (EIA) and meet certain minimum standards of environmental impact and sustainability.
For example, operators of activities to conserve and restore habitats, ecosystems, and species must be independently certified and must implement a management plan on a 10-year cycle.
For the production of plastic packaging, adjustments had been called for in the Commission’s public consultation. Stakeholders had suggested that the criteria of the taxonomy should be adapted to other EU legislation: for example, to the revision of the Packaging Regulation currently under negotiation, the Water Framework Directive or the Ecodesign Directive, which is also currently being revised.
Now, stricter criteria apply to plastic packaging in the taxonomy than those in the upcoming revised legislation. These relate to the use of recyclate, ecodesign and the recyclability of the product. The proportion of recyclate in packaging, for example, must be at least 35 percent (for non-touch packaging) by 2028 under the taxonomy, with a target of ten percent for touch-sensitive packaging (such as for food). From 2028, these values will be increased to 65 and 50 percent, respectively. The Commission’s draft Packaging Regulation provides for a minimum value of up to 35 percent from 2030 and up to 65 percent from 2040.
Reactions to the delegated acts were mostly positive. The Federal Association of the German Waste Management, Water and Environmental Service Industries (BDE) stated that the EU Taxonomy Regulation was a “proper and sensible instrument for more sustainability”. It was particularly pleasing that the circular economy was explicitly mentioned. From the association’s point of view, it is regrettable that waste-to-energy has not yet been considered as a sustainable activity, as it makes an important contribution to the environmental objectives of the taxonomy as a pollutant sink for hazardous substances in waste and through the recovery of metals.
In a statement, the climate think tank E3G criticizes that some activities originally proposed by the Sustainable Finance Platform were not included in the Commission proposal. These included, in particular, sectors with high environmental impacts such as chemicals, textiles, agriculture and fisheries. “For these, science-based, ambitious criteria should be developed and included in the taxonomy”, writes E3G’s Tsvetelina Kuzmanova. Similarly, existing weak criteria, such as those for the forestry sector, should also have been improved.
The delegated acts will now be submitted to the Parliament and Council for a two-month review and are expected to enter into force from January 2024.
Whether the leap from Rotenburg to far-away Brussels was difficult? For Jan-Christoph Oetjen, who has been sitting in the European Parliament for the Liberal Group since 2019, the distance wasn’t too great: “Here, in terms of working methods, you’re actually close to local politics.” And that’s just the way the 45-year-old likes it: “Party politics play a subordinate role, new majorities are always formed, you can make things happen crosswise.”
This requires a different task profile than in the state parliament in Lower Saxony, which is characterized by the tension between government and opposition. In addition to his ongoing involvement in local politics, Oetjen was re-elected to the state parliament three times for the FDP between 2003 and 2019.
But the dimensions have changed since those days. Compared to the state parliament of Lower Saxony, the European Parliament is “so big that I really got lost on my way back to the office at the beginning”, Oetjen says. And: The scope of the decisions is different. Most recently, he sensed this with the issue of the CO2 emission standards for passenger cars, which was an extraordinary situation for him, Vice Chairman of the Transport Committee.
Oetjen counters the critics of e-fuels by saying that it is true that cars can be operated most efficiently electrically and that electric cars will therefore play a central role. However, it must be kept in mind that the expansion of the relevant infrastructure must be implemented not only in Germany and France, but also in northern Finland, Romania and La Réunion. Oetjen is not sure whether this is feasible by 2035.
Oetjen is also skeptical about the extent to which it will be possible to negotiate politically which technologies will be future-oriented. E-fuels will continue to be produced in any case; that is guaranteed by the demand from shipping and aviation alone. If there is a supply for passenger cars that does not find any customers – for example, because the costs are too high or the efficiency is too low – then that would not be a loss: “Then it was not a political decision, it was decided by the citizens through their consumption.”
Oetjen can boil down the basic features of an innovative transport concept for Europe to three key words: “digital, borderless, sustainable”. It is a matter of great concern to him that, especially in questions of mobility, thinking beyond national borders should come to an end. Here, he says, there are tasks that show that gaps have remained in Europe: “There are fewer bridges between Baden-Württemberg and Alsace today than before the First World War, and where there are no bridges, there is no traffic.”
That’s why Oetjen is enthusiastic about concepts that want to make tickets for mobility services bookable across national borders, in which everything from e-scooters to long-distance trains are brought together in an app, regardless of location. After all, low-threshold exchange opportunities are essential for the success of the European project.
Oetjen himself was sent by train to France for a school exchange at the age of 13, and has been an avowed European ever since. Today, he is married to a French woman, and their children are growing up in two cultures. The mission for the future is clear in Oetjen’s mind: “That will remain one of the main tasks – to bring Europe to life.” Julius Schwarzwälder
