The word “sustainability” can cover a multitude of interpretations, but when it comes to fisheries policy there is no ambiguity: today’s overfishing means tomorrow’s collapsing fish stocks. Until recently the Common Fisheries Policy has been a classic case of unsustainability, a stand-off between short term political pressures on the one hand and scientific evidence warning [...]
There is no doubt that European standards for commerce and industry have had a profound influence across the world. Europe’s standards have become global standards, if only because anyone wishing to sell their goods on European markets must respect them. Emission limits for motor vehicles, for instance, is one sector where EU legislation has had [...]
A few days ago the death was announced of F. Sherwood Rowland, the American scientist who identified the damage being caused by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to the earth’s protective ozone layer. His pioneering scientific work and the fierce campaigning by him and his collaborators led to a UN framework agreement to tackle the problem and to [...]
The political pressures are building as we approach the next reform of Europe’s common agricultural policy. The European Commission will finalise its detailed proposals for the future of the CAP in the summer, with a view to decisions in 2012. Of course the budget issue already looms large, with President Sarkozy insisting that the EU [...]
For the European Union it was a depressing end to the year! Gone were all hopes of providing global leadership at the Copenhagen conference on climate change. The EU found itself helpless on the sidelines as the US president, constrained by a sceptical Congress, confronted a Chinese prime minister apparently determined to reject any binding [...]
The European Parliament’s convincing vote for Jose Manuel Barroso’s second term as European Commission president puts him in a stronger position than any candidate since Jacques Delors in the 1980s. To have secured the votes of the European Conservatives and their allies and an estimated 25 Socialists in addition to his centre right supporters in [...]
Who’d be leader of the British Conservatives in the European Parliament? No sooner had the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) been formed, with representation of eight member countries, than Finland’s Hannu Takkula decided not to join the group after all. He has chosen to remain with the Liberal ALDE group in deference to home [...]
It’s maybe hard to think of global warming as we shiver in the coldest European winter for two decades, but there are just nine months to go before COP15, the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen, which may well determine whether or not the world can respond to a threat to our planet which [...]
The surge in world food prices, oil prices at well over $110 a barrel and measures to boost the use of biofuels in the US and Europe are putting policy-makers into crisis mode.
It is extraordinary how this situation has taken fire in just a few months and how intertwined the different factors are. A perfect [...]
Blogging commentary on current events from the perspective of someone who has been closely involved with the policies, the policy-makers and the whole complex network of people who make the process of European integration so exciting and absorbing. more.
