Climate policy outlook 2022 + Evelyne Gebhardt interview + CBAM draft report

After giving you a digital policy outlook for the coming months yesterday, today it’s the turn of European climate policy. 2022 is supposed to be the year in which the EU’s ambitious goals are implemented. But there are complicated negotiations ahead in the parliamentary committees and in the trialogues. In addition, the EU Commission also wants to launch further Green Deal projects.

The proposal for a European CO2 border adjustment has already left the starting block and cleared another hurdle yesterday. Mohammed Chahim is a Dutch MEP and the Parliament’s rapporteur for the planned CBAM. On Wednesday, the social democrat presented his draft report and calls for significant changes in it. For example, the allocation of free emission allowances is to expire considerably earlier than proposed by the Commission. The scope of the CBAM would also have to be extended. Timo Landenberger has summarized the demands.

It is small, even in its own opinion. Yet it is responsible for some of the really big data processors: the Irish data protection regulator DPC. Now, EU Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders has responded to a letter from several female EU parliamentarians and provisionally ruled out infringement proceedings against Ireland. Falk Steiner reports on why this is far from the end of the dispute, however.

28 years of forging European compromises – this is the experience that Franco-German Evelyne Gebhardt will be able to look back on in just under a month’s time when she steps down from her mandate as an MEP. She told Jasmin Kohl how the 67-year-old social democrat defied political low blows, remained true to her own style, and dispelled the cliché that women don’t know how to handle technology. Her wish for the traffic light coalition: to see European policy less as a policy against each other and more as a policy with each other.

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Lukas Scheid