Eurobloat #0148 • August 2022
August is the month when the Commission usually goes to the beach. This year it stayed behind to tell you how warm your living room may be, who may visit the continent, and which fossil fuel is now spiritually renewable.
Folly of the Month: Brussels decides how much gas you are allowed to use
On 5 August the Council adopted Regulation 2022/1369, in force four days later, asking every member state to cut gas demand by 15 percent through the winter, with the comforting small print that the Council can flip the target from voluntary to mandatory whenever it pleases. The energy shortage was the direct and predictable result of a decade of policy that shut down nuclear plants, banned domestic exploration and bet the continent on a pipeline from Moscow. Having engineered the dependency, Brussels now graciously offers to manage the rationing. The same institutions that forbade member states from drilling their own gas will, if the mood takes them, soon decide which factories get switched off first.
→ clearygottlieb.com → eur-lex.europa.eu
1. Russian gas is now officially green
On 4 August the Commission's complementary climate delegated act, Delegated Regulation 2022/1214, entered into force, formally classifying certain natural gas and nuclear activities as sustainable under the EU taxonomy. After years of sermons, the bloc discovered that the planet-saving label can be reattached to fossil fuel the moment the lights threaten to go out. The science, apparently, follows the gas bill.
2. The thermostat police
As part of REPowerEU the Commission spent August urging citizens to set their heating to 19 degrees and to negotiate with their neighbours over the communal boiler. There is nothing like a continent-spanning bureaucracy reaching into your hallway to remind you who is really in charge of the radiator. Turning it down one degree saves seven percent of your heating, they note, as if you could not have worked that out yourself.
3. The deal with the regime that bribes MEPs
The afterglow of von der Leyen's July handshake with Azerbaijan's President Aliyev, a memorandum to double gas exports, hung over August. The Commission that lectures member states on the rule of law had just embraced a government that the Council of Europe found had laundered nearly three billion dollars to pay off European politicians. Trustworthy partners, the President called them.
4. Open borders, except when they are not
On 31 August foreign ministers met informally in Prague and could not agree to stop issuing tourist visas to Russian citizens, settling instead for suspending a visa-facilitation deal while the actual border decisions fell to the frontline states acting alone. The bloc that built a borderless Schengen and scolds members who guard their own frontiers found it could not agree on the one restriction that made obvious sense. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Finland eventually did the job themselves.
5. Worst drought in 500 years, brought to you by the people who run the weather
On 23 August the Commission's Joint Research Centre announced that the drought gripping Europe was the worst in at least five centuries, with 47 percent of the bloc under warning conditions. The same Commission that had just spent the month rationing energy and rebranding gas now produced a press release about the apocalypse it says it is fighting. The maps were striking. The self-awareness was not.
6. Chat Control will not go away
Throughout August the Commission's proposal to oblige messaging apps to scan everyone's private messages for illegal content, encryption and all, continued to advance, despite Parliament's own commissioned study warning that the technology does not work and would shatter end-to-end encryption. Reading every citizen's correspondence to catch criminals is the sort of idea that surveillance states cherish. Brussels presents it as child protection and hopes nobody notices the difference.
7. Type-approval rules for cars that drive themselves
On 5 August the Commission published Implementing Regulation 2022/1426, four annexes and pages of technical specifications laying down how to type-approve the automated driving systems of fully automated vehicles. Cars that scarcely exist on European roads now have a full Brussels rulebook waiting for them. Never let an absent product escape regulation.
8. Stretching the monkeypox jab
On 19 August the European Medicines Agency advised that the Imvanex vaccine could be given intradermally at one fifth of the dose to make scarce supplies last. The sensible workaround was needed precisely because the bloc, fresh from its centralised pandemic procurement triumphs, had once again failed to secure enough doses in time. The fix was clever. The shortage was avoidable.
9. The firefighting fleet meets a continent on fire
Through August the EU's rescEU fleet of firefighting aircraft and the Civil Protection Mechanism were scrambled across France and beyond as wildfires tore through forests during the record drought. The flying water-bombers make for fine photographs and a useful badge of European solidarity. They also conveniently distract from the fact that the energy and forestry policies feeding the crisis were written in the same building.
→ civil-protection-humanitarian-aid.ec.europa.eu
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