A twitter feed too….

One of the problems I’ve found with blogging is that I often see interesting articles, but don’t get around to creating a blog post. I’m now trying out Twitter as a way of dealing with this problem.

On the web page of this blog (but not on the RSS feed) you will now see a new list of my twitter posts on the right hand side [I know I need to find a better template soon...].

Alternatively, you can view my twitter feed via any twitter software, under mwarhurst – or you can just look at http://twitter.com/mwarhurst

I’m doing most of the tweeting from the Reeder app on my iPhone.

The 20-30-40% issue and some Copenhagen blogs….

I’m not at Copenhagen, and I don’t work directly on climate (though of course much of what I do is closely linked to climate). However, it’s a bit strange to have an EU Environment blog without mentioning Copenhagen!

One key EU question in the whole process is whether the EU should go for a 30% reduction in emissions by 2020, rather than the 20% that they have already committed to…

The ENDS blog is quoting the Swedish Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren as saying:

“We need more ambitious offers from the US and China. We want to go to 30% but don’t want a sell out… 30% will be part of the end game. It could be decided in the last hours of Copenhagen.”

Friends of the Earth is arguing that the EU should in fact be committing to a 40% cut – without offsets – and have a report to show it is possible.

If you want to follow what’s happening, these three blogs are a good start:

• The Friends of the Earth International blog
• The Guardian’s Copenhagen blog
• The ENDS Copenhagen blog

Barroso outlines responsibilities of Commissioners-designate

European Commission President Barroso has sent letters to all the people he has nominated as Commissioners, outlining his view of their priorities. All the letters are available on the Commission web site here.

(I got this link from the excellent ENDS Europe Daily email newsletter).

“Other worlds are possible” – a new book on climate, development and growth

New Economics Foundation has published a new book, “Other Worlds are Possible”, which contains a set of essays on climate change, development & growth.

It features contributions from Dr Rajendra Pachauri (Chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Professor Herman Daly (Leading environmental economist and winner of Right Livelihood Award), Professor Wangari Maathai (Nobel Peace Prize winner), Professor Manfred Max-Neef (environmental economist and winner of the Right Livelihood Award), Professor Jayati Ghosh (economist) and David Woodward (nef fellow).

It can be bought in print, or downloaded free from this page:

http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/other-worlds-are-possible

A forward by Herman Daly introduces the book:

Climate change, important as it is, is nevertheless a symptom of a deeper malady, namely our fixation on unlimited growth of the economy as the solution to nearly all problems. Apply an anodyne to climate and, if growth continues, something else will soon burst through limits of past adaptation and finitude, thereby becoming the new crisis on which to focus our worries.

The fact that the contributors to “Other Worlds are Possible” realise this makes this report a serious study. The fact that they seek qualitative development that is not dependent on quantitative growth makes it a hopeful study. It is a valuable collection of the specific and the general, of the grass roots details and the macroeconomic big picture regarding climate change and economic development.

The reader is told up front that, ‘This report represents the work and views of a range of individuals and civil society groups. It is a contribution to debate on what other worlds are possible. Not all the views and policies discussed are necessarily held by all the groups and individuals’. Although I did not find any contradictions among the various contributions, they differ greatly in approach and perspective—mainly between top-down and bottom-up modes of thought. Some people like to start with a big picture. They are impatient with concrete details until they can fit them into or deduce them from a framework of meaning consistent with first principles. Others are impatient with a big picture unless they first have a lot of concrete details and examples that inductively suggest a larger pattern. I confess that I belong to the first type, but that is more of a bias than a virtue. Both approaches are necessary, and are present in this collection, but the bottom-up predominates, at least in number of pages.

My advice to the top-down types is to first read Manfred Max-Neef’s fine big-picture essay. Then fit in the inspiring examples of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, Thailand’s self sufficiency, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness, the Happy Earthworm Project, the Happy Planet Index, etc. More inductive types should save Max-Neef for last. I do not mean to characterize Max-Neef as a top-down thinker since he has spent much of his life doing grass roots, ‘barefoot’ economics. But in this volume’s division of labour his is the big-picture essay.

To have packed so much information, inspiration, and analysis into less than 100 pages of clear prose leaves the reader grateful to the authors, the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, and nef.

Some challenges for the new Environment Commissioner (updated)

So, Commission President Barroso has nominated his new Commission, and moved around some roles.

Given the name of this blog, clearly the Environment Commissioner is particularly important, and President Barroso has nominated the current Slovenian DG Research Commissioner, Janez Potočnik.

Commissioner Potočnik has a blog already, as DG Research Commissioner, and he has posted quite a few entries on climate/low carbon economy, and also on the broader issue of sustainable development, including the following statement:

“Our ability to sustain will depend on whether we can and want to change our behaviour, both at global and at local levels in our daily lives. It will hinge on whether can find a new model of economic development that marries economic, social and environmental objectives: profit, people and planet. Sustainability is no longer an issue of morality only; it is also becoming an issue of self-interest”

Update: He has also posted a brief statement on his nomination as Environment Commissioner.

In his new job (assuming he is accepted by the parliament) he will be in an important position to address the challenge of sustainable development.

It’s true that DG Environment has lost climate policy to the new DG Climate Action, but there are many other important policy areas still in the DG, which have an important part to play in reducing our climate impacts, as well as moving us towards a more sustainable world.

For example:

• We in Europe are using an ever-increasing amount of the world’s resources, and we are particularly dependent on imported resources. Yet Europe is not even measuring its resource use, nor does it have any targets to reduce it (we have some ideas that could help). This is in spite of the fact that resource efficiency is also economically beneficial.
• The EU has been developing policies on waste for many years, yet we still dispose of more than €5 billion per year of valuable resources by landfill or incineration; if these materials were recycled it would save climate emissions equivalent to taking around 47 million cars off the road every year.
• The EU has a target to halt the loss in biodiversity within the EU by 2010 – this will not be met, according to the European Environment Agency. At the same time, the global biodiversity situation is even worse, with the EU directly responsible for some of this through the impacts of our consumption. For example, the impacts on wildlife of soy production in South America – soy that is used to feed Europe’s chickens, cows and pigs.

[For a longer list of policies for the new Commission, see the Spring Alliance manifesto.]

Some important changes in the new Commission

Following on from the previous post, Barroso has made a number of changes to the division of responsibilities in the new Commission – here’s some notable changes:

• A new DG Climate Action has been created, made up of the climate section of the old DG Environment
• Energy and Transport have been separated, creating a DG Energy and a DG Transport
• DG Health and Consumer Policy (which has often been called DG Sanco) has been strengthened with the transfer of some key regulatory dossiers – pharmaceutical products and cosmetics, including the Medicines agency (from DG Enterprise) and biotechnology & pesticides (from DG Environment)
• DG Enterprise is now called DG Industry and Entrepreneurship, and though it looses pharmaceuticals, it retains the regulation of chemicals. This is unfortunate, given the inherent conflict of interest between a department that both promotes an industry and regulates its environmental and health impacts.

A full description of the new Commission structure is available in this document.

The new (nominees) for the European Commission

President Barroso has announced his new commission (who will be subject to approval by the European Parliament).

The Commissioner-designate for the Environment is Janez Potocnik (Slovenia), who was Commissioner for Research in the last Commission, the new DG ‘Climate Action’ nominee is Connie Hedegaard from Denmark.

The third document linked below explains the new DG Climate Action:
“DG Climate Action (to be set up before Summer 2010): core of DG Climate Action will be the existing Directorate C of DG Environment (ENV) except the Clean Air Unit ENV C.3 that will remain in DG Environment.”

Here are the changes to DG Environment:
“Changes for DG ENV: – The Climate Directorate ENV C moves from DG ENV to the new DG for Climate Action (except the Clean Air Unit C.3); – The Civil Protection Units ENV A.3. and ENV A.4 move from DG ENV to DG Humanitarian Aid (ECHO); – The Biotechnology, Pesticides and Health Unit ENV D.4 moves from DG ENV to DG Health and Consumers (SANCO).”

The press release is here:
http://ec.europa.eu/commission_designate_2009-2014/pdf/press_release_barroso_team_en.pdf

Photos linked to brief CVs [NB: this page has since vanished; it may return...]:
http://ec.europa.eu/commission_designate_2009-2014/index_en.htm

The detailed portfolios are here:
http://ec.europa.eu/commission_designate_2009-2014/pdf/portfolio_table_barroso_en.pdf

An elected EU President?

So, last week the new European Council President was selected, after lots of secret discussions between the EU member state governments, and with the European Parliament and Barrosso having their inputs too.

There has been a lot of criticism of the secretive nature of this process, with some suggestion (even from Eurosceptics it seems) that the president should have been subject to EU wide election.

Firstly, it is – unfortunately – normal for intergovernmental decision making to be pretty secretive, whether in the EU or elsewhere. The most open EU insitution is the Parliament, while the Council processes are probably the most secretive.

Each EU government is, of course, elected, and can argue that this is what ‘representative democracy’ is all about – “you elected us to run the country and represent the country at EU and international level”.

Imagine we did have an elected EU president – this person would immediately have one of the strongest democratic mandates in the world, elected by an electorate of around 500 million people. How would they relate to the 27 EU member states – would they view themselves as more representative of EU opinion? Would they therefore create a strong push towards a more federal EU?

A second issue is what would actually happen during the election process? Would the outcome be viewed as more democratically legitimate than the current process? Or  maybe it would be more like the Eurovision song contest – people voting for the candidate from their country and some friendly neighbours. For example, you could logically end up with a German president given that this is the largest EU country. Would this result be welcomed in other countries, or would it just create even more division? I can’t see the UK tabloids being very happy!

Understanding all the different European ‘Councils’

The blogger nosemonkey has posted a nice clear summary to try to clear up the confusion many people have between: The European Council, the Council of the European Union, the Council of Ministers and the Council of Europe:

http://www.jcm.org.uk/blog/?p=2429

It includes an explanation of why the new president of the European Council would be much more powerful if they were actually a president of the Council of the European Union (or of the Council of Ministers, which is the same thing…).

Here is his summary:

Council of Europe


Not an EU body; concerned with democracy and justice

Council of the European Union


At once the EU’s Cabinet and Upper House of the legislature; where the decisions are made

Council of Ministers


The same as the Council of the European Union

European Council


The heads of government of the EU member states; an EU body but not an EU institution; effectively just a formalised old-school international summit, like the G8 or G20

Welcome pack for Environment Committee MEPs, briefing documents on climate policy

The Institute for European Environmental Policy’s (IEEP) latest newsletter is full of interesting stuff, including links to a couple of projects involving training MEPs, and stories on EU land use, sustainable development indicators & promoting the importance of biodiversity:
http://www.ieep.eu/publications/pdfs/newsletters/newsletter_autumn_2009.pdf

The first training project is a set of briefing documents on climate policy, aimed at MEPs and assistants (they are also running a training programme):
http://www.ieep.eu/climatebriefings//

The second is a welcome package for new MEPs on the Environment Committee, which summarises legislative progress in the last parliament, identifies some priorities for the next & lists upcoming implementation and review dates for legislation:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/activities/committees/studies/download.do?language=en&file=26671