EU summit topics + China’s ETS + How Kaili used the EPRS

Migration policy was supposed to be the focus of today’s special EU summit – but now a special guest is likely to set the tone: After surprise visits to London and Paris, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is expected in Brussels today. There is also a need to talk about a completely different topic, namely Europe’s reaction to the US Inflation Reduction Act. “An unrestrained subsidy race with the US would certainly be the wrong way to go,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said yesterday in the Bundestag. You will find an outlook on the summit at the beginning of our briefing.

Faulty data along with lax controls by authorities: According to the Chinese Ministry of the Environment, a large part of the emissions data of all those companies that participate in the Chinese Emission Trading System (ETS) has deficiencies. The unreliable data situation could become a problem for the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). However, as Nico Beckert and Lukas Scheid have learned, the EU is keeping a backdoor open for precisely this case.

The Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA) is an internal body of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) that hardly anyone outside Parliament knows about. For Eva Kaili, the main figure in the corruption scandal, however, it had an important function: she used its chairmanship for her political work – and awarded posts to her sister and the quasi-governmental Qatar Foundation, as Charlotte Wirth’s research shows.

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Sarah Schaefer