- Recast of the Buildings Directive
- Fight against bogus self-employment of platform workers
- Tthe French EU Presidency’s plans
- Ministries management levels’ overview
- Criticism of supply chain law postponement
- EU vaccination certificates to be valid for nine months
- Amazon fined billions
- Antitrust agency to probe Kustomer takeover by Facebook
- Changes to roaming regulation
- Opinion: Struggle for rule of law – the hour of politics
Day two of the new traffic light government is over. On Thursday, the last of the new ministers took office. In line with this, we have broken down for you the leadership levels of the ministries that are particularly relevant for the Green Deal, digitalization in Europe, and German European policy. We will continue to add to this overview in the coming weeks. You can find all further developments under this link.
The developments we can expect from the French EU Presidency were announced by French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday. My colleague Tanja Kuchenbecker explains the most important plans. Macron wants to push for better border protection, better organization of migration, and better protection for climate-friendly, European products through a CO2 border tax. Incidentally, the new German government would prefer to achieve the latter through so-called climate clubs.
Speaking of climate, next week, the EU Commission will present another package of legislation to implement the Green Deal, including a recast of the Energy Efficiency Directive for Buildings. Timo Landenberger analyses how the Commission intends to make the building sector – the EU’s biggest energy consumer – more climate-friendly.
The Commission presented on Thursday how it intends to tackle precarious working conditions on online platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo. Around 5,5 million platform workers in the EU are currently classified as self-employed, although according to the Commission, they are, in fact, employees. Jasmin Kohl explains what social protection platform workers who are not self-employed could expect in the future.
Lukas Scheid
Feature
Building efficiency: too little leeway for nation states?
With the presentation of its Fit for 55 package last summer, the EU Commission put a comprehensive first package of measures on the table to achieve the European climate targets. Now the Brussels authority wants to follow up and present a further legislative package on December 14th, including a new version of the directive on energy efficiency in buildings.
The regulations are eagerly awaited, as they are expected to contain specific requirements for solar installations on roofs, the use of heat pumps, minimum standards for renovations, and the availability of charging stations for electric vehicles, which is likely to have far-reaching consequences. Observers also expect detailed specifications on overall energy efficiency.
According to insiders, the proposal would require all full-time buildings with the lowest energy rating G to be renovated to a higher rating by 2030. This would require EU states to renovate millions of homes, offices, and commercial buildings, with countries affected to varying degrees. In Italy, about a third of residential buildings have the lowest energy efficiency class G, while in the Netherlands it is only four percent.
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