The EU wants to trade more sustainably with New Zealand in the future. The agreement states, for example, that both sides will implement the Paris Climate Agreement. However, just as important as climate protection is the message of the deal: in turbulent times, democracies stand closely together. Till Hoppe has analyzed the trade agreement.
345 million people worldwide are acutely affected by famine. The grain stuck in Ukraine could even feed a higher number of people. David Beasley, director of the World Food Program, sees only one solution to this: a rapid opening of sea routes. Timo Landenberger has the details.
What should it look like, the AI Act? The 3,000 amendments submitted to the EU Commission’s proposals show that the lead committees LIBE and IMCO still have a lot of work ahead of them. Falk Steiner has shed light on the important areas.
It’s Friday and our columnist Claire Stam takes a look at the week ahead. In Strasbourg, MEPs have a difficult decision to make, namely whether or not to classify natural gas and nuclear energy as sustainable investments. As of now, many are still undecided.
Have a nice weekend.
They are grim scenarios that David Beasley outlined in Brussels. If you take a country that produces enough grain to feed 400 million people off the market, “you can imagine how disastrous the consequences are,” the director of the World Food Program (WFP) told the EU Parliament’s agriculture committee on Thursday.
Some 20 million tons of food remain stuck in Ukraine, but are urgently needed on the world market. Beasley spoke of the biggest humanitarian crisis since World War II.
According to the WFP, 345 million people worldwide are acutely affected by famine. Six years ago, the figure was 80 million. As a result of climate change and conflicts, the number grew to 135 million and rose again significantly to 276 million due to the COVID-19 pandemic before the outbreak of war.
There is no improvement in sight, according to Beasley. The World Food Program obtains half of its grain from Ukraine, and numerous countries around the world are even more dependent on the supplies. Yet the country’s export infrastructure for agricultural goods is entirely based on the major Black Sea ports, first and foremost Odessa. And these have been blocked since the Russian war of aggression.
Alternative transport routes by truck or rail could not solve the problem, Beasley said, thus rejecting the EU’s so-called Solidarity Lanes to support grain exports. Before the outbreak of the war, Ukraine exported about five million tons of grain per month by sea. One million tons already requires about 500 trains or up to 40,000 trucks.
In addition, traders shy away from the risk: transports across Ukraine are difficult to insure and involve high costs, so that delivery is hardly worthwhile. This became clear during a delegation trip of the Agriculture Committee to the Polish-Ukrainian border last week (Europe.Table reported). Only a fraction of the export goods there were cereals, mainly animal feed for the European market with correspondingly higher profit margins. Wheat for the world market: missing.
The committee members responded with a letter to the European Commission, in which cross-group members call for more “financial support and insurance guarantees for the leasing of locomotives, trucks and related logistical equipment and personnel. At the same time, the Brussels authority should “examine whether the EU could purchase Ukrainian wheat at a fair price level.”
In the newspaper “Die Welt”, Transport Commissioner Adina Vălean praised the progress already made. For example, she said, 2.5 million tons of grain had been taken out of Ukraine in June. But there is still room for improvement, Vălean acknowledged. Together with Ukraine’s Minister of Infrastructure, Oleksandr Kubrakov, and Andrei Spînu, Minister of Infrastructure and Regional Development from Moldova, the commissioner signed an agreement on Wednesday to facilitate truck traffic between the EU and the two countries.
The original target of exporting 20 million tons by the end of July is nevertheless unrealistic, according to recent estimates by the Polish government. There has been too little progress in logistics solutions, Poland’s Agriculture Minister Henryk Kowalczyk said on Tuesday.
For David Beasley, too, it is clear that the only way to get enough grain out of the country would be to end the port blockades. The Turkish government, therefore, wants to organize a meeting in Istanbul between representatives of the United Nations, Ukraine, and Russia. A first attempt by Turkey without the involvement of the UN and Ukraine failed a few weeks ago.
The UN is not commenting on the current status of the negotiations. However, the Financial Times writes that an agreement is a long way off. According to the paper, Taras Kachka, Ukraine’s economy minister and chief negotiator, said Russia was using the talks to advance its war aims. Rumors of a breakthrough are “more optimistic than reality,” he said. The situation is tricky. Russia has already destroyed key parts of the port infrastructure and is blocking sea lanes. Ukraine has mined its ports for fear of further Russian attacks.
WFP chief Beasley calls on the EU to exert even more pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin. Maintaining the naval blockade would be a declaration of war on global food security. The consequences would far exceed those of the food crisis in 2007/08.
Beasley, therefore, welcomed the declaration by the G7 countries. It includes an urgent appeal to Russia to end the blockades without preconditions and a pledge to provide a further $4.5 billion for food security. In addition, the EU countries must now do everything possible to increase their own food production, Beasley demanded.
The CDU’s Marlene Mortler has been criticizing the debate on agricultural policy in Germany and the EU for some time. “We pillory conventional agriculture and organic is considered the measure of all things. Can we afford that in these times?”
Maria Noichl (SPD) countered: “Some still believe that Europe has to feed the world.” Quick aid was indeed urgently needed. In the long term, however, countries in Africa or the Middle East can only achieve food security if this goes hand in hand with food sovereignty, i.e. the independent and regional production of food. That is what needs to be promoted.
MEPs have submitted over 3,000 amendments to the EU Commission’s proposals. During the exchange between the responsible rapporteurs in a joint meeting of the Internal Market Committee (IMCO) and the Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE), it became clear what the priorities are.
Nervously, he turns his wedding ring on his finger, but otherwise appears satisfied: Dragoș Tudorache (Renew), who is in charge of the LIBE Committee, praised the large number of amendments: these showed the will of the parliamentarians to improve the Commission’s proposal. The Italian IMCO co-rapporteur Brando Benifei (PD/S&D) emphasized that the protection of fundamental rights must be decisive. Benifei and Tudorache tabled over 300 amendments in their joint draft report alone.
According to industry experts, two areas are particularly relevant. One is the question of what all should fall under Article 5 of the regulation: Prohibited Practices. Among other things, the Commission includes subliminal influence, but also social scoring and potentially discriminatory use. The Commission does not want to ban biometric remote identification systems in public spaces – for example, facial or gait recognition systems – completely, but rather provide them with exceptions to the ban. If this were unavoidable, it should be permissible to use real-time biometric remote recognition systems to search for perpetrators or suspects who are the subject of an arrest warrant for a criminal offense carrying a prison sentence of at least five years, but also to avert a concrete threat to life and limb.
Some parliamentarians fear that this would involve massive infringements of fundamental rights. Various motions therefore want to extend the list of bans. At the same time, however, many of the motions provide for exceptions – a jungle of rules-exception-exception-when-then-rules threatens to emerge.
Because what is not prohibited from the outset is far from being permitted. A fundamental rights impact assessment must be mandatory for all users of high-risk AI systems. This is an essential missing element in the Commission’s draft, said co-rapporteur Benifei yesterday. But where exactly the boundaries run and how they are to be drawn will be one of the key questions for further deliberations. Emotion recognition, for example, is not a high-risk system, but is so inaccurate and scientifically insufficiently based that this form of (alleged) artificial intelligence should be banned in Europe, Benifei said.
From Tudorache’s perspective, the definitions of high-risk AI are crucial to the success of the regulation. On the one hand, the aim is to regulate AI that is potentially harmful, but at the same time to avoid imposing too many requirements on purely industrial AI applications.
He wants to be more precise here and is sure that a “very good compromise” is possible. The question of what all counts as high-risk AI and should therefore fall under the stricter regulations of the regulation text is a matter of concern for many of the amendments. Consumer advocates fear that this could open the door to the use of AI systems in harmful areas, while industry representatives see the danger of unintentional overregulation and a threat to future business models.
The Commission proposal itself does not spell out the criteria for such systems, but defines the criteria in Annex III to the regulation. Green politicians, for example, want this annex to be reviewed every six months (Amendment 774). In addition, they call for massive restrictions on applications by public authorities if they interfere deeply with fundamental rights. Green MEP Sergey Lagodinksy, for example, called for AI-based profiling in migration issues, asylum procedures and border controls to be closely regulated. Lagodinsky is referring, among other things, to the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, which in the past has attempted to perform its tasks with the help of artificial intelligence.
MEPs also need to put a special focus on the enforcement mechanism for the AI Regulation. “Maybe for the first stage we will only get reinforcement of national strands,” said Axel Voss (CDU/EPP). In a second stage, he said, it would be necessary to consider whether “out of all these legal acts that we are currently enacting, we shouldn’t pull this together into one agency.”
Currently, there is a risk of a colorful juxtaposition of responsibilities in different authorities for enforcing DMA, DSA, GDPR, AI Act, Data Governance Act and Data Act. More important than speed, however, is that it would be a workable regulation, Voss said.
Benifei and Tudorache expressed confidence that the Parliament would soon find good compromises. This was also a message to the Council, Benifei said, that they wanted and delivered an agreement, and that they expected the same from the Council. Co-rapporteur Tudorache reiterated the importance of achieving the broadest possible consensus on the dossier.
Whether the timetable can actually be maintained is currently an open question. The first “technicals” are to take place in July, meetings of the parliamentarians involved and their staff, at which the large number of amendments will be sorted and grouped together. After the summer break, work is to continue as quickly as possible – the two lead committees, IMCO and LIBE, will then vote on their recommendations, probably on September 29. The Industry Committee ITRE and the Environment and Health Committee ENVI had already submitted their recommendations.
With over 3000 amendments, that’s not much time to turn his wedding ring a few more times.
The German Chemical Industry Association (VCI) believes that the new Council compromise does not solve the industry’s problems with the planned CO2 Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). It is true that the Council proposal is better than that of the Commission and Parliament, explains a VCI spokesman. “But viewed in its entirety on the CBAM problem, it is cosmetic and does not change the fundamental problems we have with border adjustment measures.”
The Council proposal, which was adopted at Germany’s request, envisages a much slower introduction path for the CBAM at the outset, with a simultaneous reduction in free emission allowances for the industry. Free allocations would initially be reduced by only 5 percentage points per year from 2026, then more rapidly at a later date. In 2035, the free allowances would finally be completely replaced by the CBAM as protection against carbon leakage.
The EU Commission had proposed a phase-in path of ten percentage points per year over the same period. The European Parliament has agreed on a later path, which will initially allow the free certificates to melt away slowly from 2027. But as early as 2032, the CBAM is to replace them completely.
The VCI criticizes that the effectiveness of CBAM as a replacement for free allocations has not yet been tested. “We fear a legally uncertain and abuse-prone bureaucratic monster that is likely to trigger trade conflicts.” It would also make exports more expensive for the export-intensive chemical industry and its customers, the association fears.
The VCI is also calling for the upcoming trialogue to keep chemical products outside the CBAM scope. “If ammonia is not out of scope, we need a price compensation solution to protect ammonia value chains.” Parliament had proposed the inclusion of organic chemicals, plastics, hydrogen, and ammonia (Europe.Table reported). luk
Taxonomy is a bit like sauerkraut, a thoroughly quaint Alsatian dish: everything depends on the choice of ingredients. And MEPs will have to decide next week what the taxonomy should consist of, this financial instrument that aims to classify economic activities according to their positive impact on the environment and the climate. In doing so, they will vote for or against the European Commission’s Delegated Act, which proposes to include fossil gas and nuclear energy in the classification of sustainable investments. In its argumentation, the EU executive considers gas and nuclear power as transitional fuels on the way to a climate-neutral Europe.
It is an understatement to say that the proposal has caused an outcry among environmental organizations and among a number of EU parliamentarians. First, because the procedure chosen, the delegated act, de facto precludes negotiations: quite a few MEPs felt blindsided by the Commission. Second, because the credibility of the instrument is at stake if it gives the green seal to an energy source that feeds the war in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, has recognized the explosive nature of the situation. In a letter to German MEP Viola von Cramon (Greens), he calls on the European Parliament to reject the second Delegated Act, referring to the “security significance” of the vote. The current proposal would promote the construction of gas-fired power plants, while LNG terminals would be considered ineligible – Russian gas would accordingly be “clearly favored.” This would be a “fatal signal” amid Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the letter says.
Formally, the European Parliament and the Council have until July 11 to decide whether or not to veto the Commission’s proposal. In the Council, it is virtually certain that the member states will give the green light.
In France, for example, the money that can be generated by applying the taxonomy is essential to realize France’s nuclear ambitions. EDF is already heavily in debt and needs to invest €100 billion between 2014 and 2030 in its “Grand Carénage” program, which aims to extend the life of its power plants. Its plans for new EPR reactors, which are not quite ready yet, could cost between €52 and €64 billion. Gas, in turn, finds its supporters mainly in Germany.
On the other hand, on the side of the EU parliamentarians, the situation is not so clear. As a reminder, if an absolute majority of at least 353 MEPs rejects the proposal, the Commission must withdraw or amend it.
So what are the chances that MEPs will overturn the highly controversial piece of legislation? The word on the street suggests that a large number of MEPs are still undecided. On June 14, the European Parliament’s Envi and Econ committees rejected the Commission’s proposal by 76 votes to 62, with 4 abstentions. In doing so, the MEPs supported a resolution represented by MEPs from five different political groups (EPP, Renew, S&D, Greens and Left).
However, Pascal Canfin, the influential chairman of the Environment Committee, thinks a no vote in plenary is unlikely. And for two reasons: opponents of the two controversial energies would have to achieve an absolute majority, while committee votes would require only a simple one. “Anyone who is not present is at the expense of achieving a majority,” the Renew MEP said. In addition the Eastern European countries that favored both energies are much more represented in the plenary than in the two committees. “The balance is very different.”
The EU wants to trade more sustainably with New Zealand in the future. The agreement states, for example, that both sides will implement the Paris Climate Agreement. However, just as important as climate protection is the message of the deal: in turbulent times, democracies stand closely together. Till Hoppe has analyzed the trade agreement.
345 million people worldwide are acutely affected by famine. The grain stuck in Ukraine could even feed a higher number of people. David Beasley, director of the World Food Program, sees only one solution to this: a rapid opening of sea routes. Timo Landenberger has the details.
What should it look like, the AI Act? The 3,000 amendments submitted to the EU Commission’s proposals show that the lead committees LIBE and IMCO still have a lot of work ahead of them. Falk Steiner has shed light on the important areas.
It’s Friday and our columnist Claire Stam takes a look at the week ahead. In Strasbourg, MEPs have a difficult decision to make, namely whether or not to classify natural gas and nuclear energy as sustainable investments. As of now, many are still undecided.
Have a nice weekend.
They are grim scenarios that David Beasley outlined in Brussels. If you take a country that produces enough grain to feed 400 million people off the market, “you can imagine how disastrous the consequences are,” the director of the World Food Program (WFP) told the EU Parliament’s agriculture committee on Thursday.
Some 20 million tons of food remain stuck in Ukraine, but are urgently needed on the world market. Beasley spoke of the biggest humanitarian crisis since World War II.
According to the WFP, 345 million people worldwide are acutely affected by famine. Six years ago, the figure was 80 million. As a result of climate change and conflicts, the number grew to 135 million and rose again significantly to 276 million due to the COVID-19 pandemic before the outbreak of war.
There is no improvement in sight, according to Beasley. The World Food Program obtains half of its grain from Ukraine, and numerous countries around the world are even more dependent on the supplies. Yet the country’s export infrastructure for agricultural goods is entirely based on the major Black Sea ports, first and foremost Odessa. And these have been blocked since the Russian war of aggression.
Alternative transport routes by truck or rail could not solve the problem, Beasley said, thus rejecting the EU’s so-called Solidarity Lanes to support grain exports. Before the outbreak of the war, Ukraine exported about five million tons of grain per month by sea. One million tons already requires about 500 trains or up to 40,000 trucks.
In addition, traders shy away from the risk: transports across Ukraine are difficult to insure and involve high costs, so that delivery is hardly worthwhile. This became clear during a delegation trip of the Agriculture Committee to the Polish-Ukrainian border last week (Europe.Table reported). Only a fraction of the export goods there were cereals, mainly animal feed for the European market with correspondingly higher profit margins. Wheat for the world market: missing.
The committee members responded with a letter to the European Commission, in which cross-group members call for more “financial support and insurance guarantees for the leasing of locomotives, trucks and related logistical equipment and personnel. At the same time, the Brussels authority should “examine whether the EU could purchase Ukrainian wheat at a fair price level.”
In the newspaper “Die Welt”, Transport Commissioner Adina Vălean praised the progress already made. For example, she said, 2.5 million tons of grain had been taken out of Ukraine in June. But there is still room for improvement, Vălean acknowledged. Together with Ukraine’s Minister of Infrastructure, Oleksandr Kubrakov, and Andrei Spînu, Minister of Infrastructure and Regional Development from Moldova, the commissioner signed an agreement on Wednesday to facilitate truck traffic between the EU and the two countries.
The original target of exporting 20 million tons by the end of July is nevertheless unrealistic, according to recent estimates by the Polish government. There has been too little progress in logistics solutions, Poland’s Agriculture Minister Henryk Kowalczyk said on Tuesday.
For David Beasley, too, it is clear that the only way to get enough grain out of the country would be to end the port blockades. The Turkish government, therefore, wants to organize a meeting in Istanbul between representatives of the United Nations, Ukraine, and Russia. A first attempt by Turkey without the involvement of the UN and Ukraine failed a few weeks ago.
The UN is not commenting on the current status of the negotiations. However, the Financial Times writes that an agreement is a long way off. According to the paper, Taras Kachka, Ukraine’s economy minister and chief negotiator, said Russia was using the talks to advance its war aims. Rumors of a breakthrough are “more optimistic than reality,” he said. The situation is tricky. Russia has already destroyed key parts of the port infrastructure and is blocking sea lanes. Ukraine has mined its ports for fear of further Russian attacks.
WFP chief Beasley calls on the EU to exert even more pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin. Maintaining the naval blockade would be a declaration of war on global food security. The consequences would far exceed those of the food crisis in 2007/08.
Beasley, therefore, welcomed the declaration by the G7 countries. It includes an urgent appeal to Russia to end the blockades without preconditions and a pledge to provide a further $4.5 billion for food security. In addition, the EU countries must now do everything possible to increase their own food production, Beasley demanded.
The CDU’s Marlene Mortler has been criticizing the debate on agricultural policy in Germany and the EU for some time. “We pillory conventional agriculture and organic is considered the measure of all things. Can we afford that in these times?”
Maria Noichl (SPD) countered: “Some still believe that Europe has to feed the world.” Quick aid was indeed urgently needed. In the long term, however, countries in Africa or the Middle East can only achieve food security if this goes hand in hand with food sovereignty, i.e. the independent and regional production of food. That is what needs to be promoted.
MEPs have submitted over 3,000 amendments to the EU Commission’s proposals. During the exchange between the responsible rapporteurs in a joint meeting of the Internal Market Committee (IMCO) and the Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE), it became clear what the priorities are.
Nervously, he turns his wedding ring on his finger, but otherwise appears satisfied: Dragoș Tudorache (Renew), who is in charge of the LIBE Committee, praised the large number of amendments: these showed the will of the parliamentarians to improve the Commission’s proposal. The Italian IMCO co-rapporteur Brando Benifei (PD/S&D) emphasized that the protection of fundamental rights must be decisive. Benifei and Tudorache tabled over 300 amendments in their joint draft report alone.
According to industry experts, two areas are particularly relevant. One is the question of what all should fall under Article 5 of the regulation: Prohibited Practices. Among other things, the Commission includes subliminal influence, but also social scoring and potentially discriminatory use. The Commission does not want to ban biometric remote identification systems in public spaces – for example, facial or gait recognition systems – completely, but rather provide them with exceptions to the ban. If this were unavoidable, it should be permissible to use real-time biometric remote recognition systems to search for perpetrators or suspects who are the subject of an arrest warrant for a criminal offense carrying a prison sentence of at least five years, but also to avert a concrete threat to life and limb.
Some parliamentarians fear that this would involve massive infringements of fundamental rights. Various motions therefore want to extend the list of bans. At the same time, however, many of the motions provide for exceptions – a jungle of rules-exception-exception-when-then-rules threatens to emerge.
Because what is not prohibited from the outset is far from being permitted. A fundamental rights impact assessment must be mandatory for all users of high-risk AI systems. This is an essential missing element in the Commission’s draft, said co-rapporteur Benifei yesterday. But where exactly the boundaries run and how they are to be drawn will be one of the key questions for further deliberations. Emotion recognition, for example, is not a high-risk system, but is so inaccurate and scientifically insufficiently based that this form of (alleged) artificial intelligence should be banned in Europe, Benifei said.
From Tudorache’s perspective, the definitions of high-risk AI are crucial to the success of the regulation. On the one hand, the aim is to regulate AI that is potentially harmful, but at the same time to avoid imposing too many requirements on purely industrial AI applications.
He wants to be more precise here and is sure that a “very good compromise” is possible. The question of what all counts as high-risk AI and should therefore fall under the stricter regulations of the regulation text is a matter of concern for many of the amendments. Consumer advocates fear that this could open the door to the use of AI systems in harmful areas, while industry representatives see the danger of unintentional overregulation and a threat to future business models.
The Commission proposal itself does not spell out the criteria for such systems, but defines the criteria in Annex III to the regulation. Green politicians, for example, want this annex to be reviewed every six months (Amendment 774). In addition, they call for massive restrictions on applications by public authorities if they interfere deeply with fundamental rights. Green MEP Sergey Lagodinksy, for example, called for AI-based profiling in migration issues, asylum procedures and border controls to be closely regulated. Lagodinsky is referring, among other things, to the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, which in the past has attempted to perform its tasks with the help of artificial intelligence.
MEPs also need to put a special focus on the enforcement mechanism for the AI Regulation. “Maybe for the first stage we will only get reinforcement of national strands,” said Axel Voss (CDU/EPP). In a second stage, he said, it would be necessary to consider whether “out of all these legal acts that we are currently enacting, we shouldn’t pull this together into one agency.”
Currently, there is a risk of a colorful juxtaposition of responsibilities in different authorities for enforcing DMA, DSA, GDPR, AI Act, Data Governance Act and Data Act. More important than speed, however, is that it would be a workable regulation, Voss said.
Benifei and Tudorache expressed confidence that the Parliament would soon find good compromises. This was also a message to the Council, Benifei said, that they wanted and delivered an agreement, and that they expected the same from the Council. Co-rapporteur Tudorache reiterated the importance of achieving the broadest possible consensus on the dossier.
Whether the timetable can actually be maintained is currently an open question. The first “technicals” are to take place in July, meetings of the parliamentarians involved and their staff, at which the large number of amendments will be sorted and grouped together. After the summer break, work is to continue as quickly as possible – the two lead committees, IMCO and LIBE, will then vote on their recommendations, probably on September 29. The Industry Committee ITRE and the Environment and Health Committee ENVI had already submitted their recommendations.
With over 3000 amendments, that’s not much time to turn his wedding ring a few more times.
The German Chemical Industry Association (VCI) believes that the new Council compromise does not solve the industry’s problems with the planned CO2 Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). It is true that the Council proposal is better than that of the Commission and Parliament, explains a VCI spokesman. “But viewed in its entirety on the CBAM problem, it is cosmetic and does not change the fundamental problems we have with border adjustment measures.”
The Council proposal, which was adopted at Germany’s request, envisages a much slower introduction path for the CBAM at the outset, with a simultaneous reduction in free emission allowances for the industry. Free allocations would initially be reduced by only 5 percentage points per year from 2026, then more rapidly at a later date. In 2035, the free allowances would finally be completely replaced by the CBAM as protection against carbon leakage.
The EU Commission had proposed a phase-in path of ten percentage points per year over the same period. The European Parliament has agreed on a later path, which will initially allow the free certificates to melt away slowly from 2027. But as early as 2032, the CBAM is to replace them completely.
The VCI criticizes that the effectiveness of CBAM as a replacement for free allocations has not yet been tested. “We fear a legally uncertain and abuse-prone bureaucratic monster that is likely to trigger trade conflicts.” It would also make exports more expensive for the export-intensive chemical industry and its customers, the association fears.
The VCI is also calling for the upcoming trialogue to keep chemical products outside the CBAM scope. “If ammonia is not out of scope, we need a price compensation solution to protect ammonia value chains.” Parliament had proposed the inclusion of organic chemicals, plastics, hydrogen, and ammonia (Europe.Table reported). luk
Taxonomy is a bit like sauerkraut, a thoroughly quaint Alsatian dish: everything depends on the choice of ingredients. And MEPs will have to decide next week what the taxonomy should consist of, this financial instrument that aims to classify economic activities according to their positive impact on the environment and the climate. In doing so, they will vote for or against the European Commission’s Delegated Act, which proposes to include fossil gas and nuclear energy in the classification of sustainable investments. In its argumentation, the EU executive considers gas and nuclear power as transitional fuels on the way to a climate-neutral Europe.
It is an understatement to say that the proposal has caused an outcry among environmental organizations and among a number of EU parliamentarians. First, because the procedure chosen, the delegated act, de facto precludes negotiations: quite a few MEPs felt blindsided by the Commission. Second, because the credibility of the instrument is at stake if it gives the green seal to an energy source that feeds the war in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, has recognized the explosive nature of the situation. In a letter to German MEP Viola von Cramon (Greens), he calls on the European Parliament to reject the second Delegated Act, referring to the “security significance” of the vote. The current proposal would promote the construction of gas-fired power plants, while LNG terminals would be considered ineligible – Russian gas would accordingly be “clearly favored.” This would be a “fatal signal” amid Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the letter says.
Formally, the European Parliament and the Council have until July 11 to decide whether or not to veto the Commission’s proposal. In the Council, it is virtually certain that the member states will give the green light.
In France, for example, the money that can be generated by applying the taxonomy is essential to realize France’s nuclear ambitions. EDF is already heavily in debt and needs to invest €100 billion between 2014 and 2030 in its “Grand Carénage” program, which aims to extend the life of its power plants. Its plans for new EPR reactors, which are not quite ready yet, could cost between €52 and €64 billion. Gas, in turn, finds its supporters mainly in Germany.
On the other hand, on the side of the EU parliamentarians, the situation is not so clear. As a reminder, if an absolute majority of at least 353 MEPs rejects the proposal, the Commission must withdraw or amend it.
So what are the chances that MEPs will overturn the highly controversial piece of legislation? The word on the street suggests that a large number of MEPs are still undecided. On June 14, the European Parliament’s Envi and Econ committees rejected the Commission’s proposal by 76 votes to 62, with 4 abstentions. In doing so, the MEPs supported a resolution represented by MEPs from five different political groups (EPP, Renew, S&D, Greens and Left).
However, Pascal Canfin, the influential chairman of the Environment Committee, thinks a no vote in plenary is unlikely. And for two reasons: opponents of the two controversial energies would have to achieve an absolute majority, while committee votes would require only a simple one. “Anyone who is not present is at the expense of achieving a majority,” the Renew MEP said. In addition the Eastern European countries that favored both energies are much more represented in the plenary than in the two committees. “The balance is very different.”
