Energy & Climate Change

Making the case that the United Kingdom (UK) needs the European Union (EU) and vice versa is at the forefront of current electoral debates in the UK. During a passionate electoral hustings event at the University of East Anglia last night, candidates clashed over visions for a federal European Union (Andrew Duff, MEP, Lib Dem), […]

A press conference between Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on March 27th 2014 provoked the latest round of commentary on Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) exports ‘rescuing’ the EU and Ukraine from Russian energy dominance. Russia supplies 30% of the EU’s gas imports and 35% of its oil and in Germany […]

If you care about climate change and the environment, you may find yourself wondering who will champion environmental issues in the EU after the upcoming elections in May. So far, the European Parliament (EP) has often been perceived as the EU’s ‘Green Champion’, i.e. its greenest institution. In this blog post, we shed some light […]

In my earlier blog post last week,[1] I argued that the creation of DG Clima—the European Commission’s climate change department—was a conscious political choice by Commission President Barroso in 2009. At the time, commentators and policy-makers disagreed on the potential impact of DG Clima on climate policy: some, such as Professor Reinhilde Veugelers from the […]

In 2009, Commission President Barroso created a new Directorate-General for Climate Action (DG Clima) in the European Commission (EC). This decision was a deliberate political choice following considerable controversy at the time. With European Elections around the corner, and now 28 Commissioners, we may yet again see a re-shuffle of Commission departments. When debating the […]

When assessing EU member states’ commitments to climate policy, the UK has long stood out as something of a paradox.[1] On one hand, since the rise in political saliency of climate change in the early 1990s, Britain has done much to assert itself as a leader in climate politics. It has often been at the […]

EU environmental action programmes set the priorities for EU environmental policy. After the 5th programme (1992-2000), which focused on sustainability,[1] the 6th programme (2002-2012) stressed the need for better implementation and the better environmental policy integration in other policy areas.[2] Adopted in November 2013, the new 7th action programme (2013-2020) focuses once again on implementation.[3] […]

There is a growing worldwide network of think tanks and research institutes which aim to provide policy-relevant climate change-related research. For example, the International Center for Climate Governance’s fascinating database of climate change think tanks currently lists 294 organizations who are “…conducting research in the field of climate change economics and policy.” Drawing on this dataset, I wanted to […]

It’s just five months until the next European Parliament elections. As with every European Election, both eurosceptics and europhiles face a key difficulty: getting people to vote. Both sides will stress how much, for better or for worse, Brussels matters in the life of European citizens. Over the coming months, we’re likely to hear politicians […]

This post follows two previous posts on the Bonnets Rouges movement in France, a first post retraced the history of environmental/farming tensions in Brittany, a second post highlighted the links between the CAP reform and the movement. This third post reflects on the failure of the ecotax in the greater context of environmental taxation in […]