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LAST UPDATE | 14 Sep 2022
THE EU PLANS a “deep and comprehensive” reform of the electricity market to cope with an energy crisis spurred by Russia’s war in Ukraine, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday.
The measures include a cap on electricity producers’ profits that would raise 140 billion euros ($140 billion) and “cushion” consumers from high prices, she said in her annual State of the European Union address.
Other steps involve rationing energy, temporary state aid and decoupling the prices of gas and electricity.
She also announced the creation of a new bank designed to spur investment of up to three billion euros in hydrogen as a Green alternative to fossil fuels.
The measures were in response to soaring energy costs as Europe painfully unhitches its decades-long dependency on Russian fossil fuels.
Sanctions on Russia and Moscow retaliation cutting off gas supplies have sent prices skyrocketing, leaving Europe to confront a difficult coming winter.
“Russia keeps on actively manipulating our energy market. They prefer to flare the gas than to deliver it,” von der Leyen said.
“This market is not functioning any more.”
To partly prepare for a tough winter, the bloc has hastily stockpiled gas reserves, hitting 84 percent of capacity well ahead of an October deadline, von der Leyen said.
But the hole left by missing Russian supplies will still hurt.
The idea to tax profits by non-gas electricity providers is to divert the money to households and businesses to weather the situation.
“These companies are making revenues they never accounted for, they never even dreamt of,” von der Leyen said.
“In these times it is wrong to receive extraordinary record profits benefiting from war and on the back of consumers,” she said.
She said “major oil, gas and coal companies” would also “have to give a crisis contribution”.
At the same time, von der Leyen highlighted that the EU is pivoting to “reliable suppliers”, naming the United States, Norway and Algeria among them.
Longer-term, the EU wants greater reliance on renewable energies, von der Leyen said, hammering a key promise of her mandate. The hydrogen investment bank proposal is another step towards that future.
Another announcement made by von der Leyen was planned legislation to secure critical raw materials for the EU as it shifts towards greater use of electric vehicles and other more environmentally friendly technologies.
In her speech, she highlighted the stranglehold China has over resources such as lithium that are key to the energy transition.
“Today, China controls the global processing industry. Almost 90 percent of rare earths and 60 percent of lithium are processed in China,” she said in her annual State of the European Union address.
The proposed law would identify “strategic projects all along the supply chain” and “build up strategic reserves where supply is at risk,” she said.
As for Russia, the EU chief signalled that the bloc would maintain its sanctions pressure on Russia as long as it waged its war in Ukraine.
“I want to make it very clear, the sanctions are here to stay. This is the time for us to show resolve, not appeasement,” she said.
Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska attended the gathering in Strasbourg, receiving a standing ovation from lawmakers.
Von der Leyen told MEPs that she would travel to Kyiv to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, her third trip to the Ukrainian capital since the war started.
“I will travel to Kiev today to meet President Zelensky” to discuss “in detail” the continuation of European aid, she said in her major annual political address.
“For the first time in its history, this Parliament is debating the state of our Union while war is raging on European soil,” said von der Leyen, dressed in Ukrainian colours.
Responding to von der Leyen’s speech, Ireland’s Green MEPs said that revenue raised thorugh the proposals must benefit consumers and indicated that reducing dependence on fossil fuels must remain a priority.
MEP Ciaran Cuffe said the proposals are “welcome news for households and businesses struggling with high energy bills. Now, we must be absolutely sure that those revenues make it back to these consumers without delay”.
“Moving forward, we need a paradigm shift in how we approach energy in Europe, as European Commission President von der Leyen proposed today. I believe that plans announced with the Dublin Declaration this week for new offshore wind energy investment marks a milestone on that journey for Ireland,” Cuffe said.
“The European Green Deal can and must protect our children’s future. President von der Leyen’s proposal today to enshrine solidarity between generations in law can ensure that the rights of our children to live on a safe and healthy planet are recognised and respected.”
MEP Grace O’Sullivan said that “many energy companies have not seen their production costs rise, but they seem happy to raise the prices they charge customers nonetheless. The recent announcement aims to end that.”
“Ultimately, the energy crisis is caused by our dependence on the fossil fuels of dictatorships. I welcome the announcement of a European Hydrogen Bank to drive the transition, but the devil will be in the details to curb the influence of fossil gas companies to ensure hydrogen is actually green.”
MEPs voted in Strasbourg this afternoon to increase the EU’s renewable energy target for this decade.
A revision of the Renewable Energy Directive that passed through the parliament is raising the target for renewables as a proportion of energy consumption to 45% by 2030, as well as setting down specific targets for sectors such as transport, buildings, and district heating and cooling.
The parliament also voted in favour of revising the Energy Efficiency Directive, which governs targets for energy consumption.
Member states must colllective reduce primary energy consumption (the level of demand) by 42.5% and final energy consumption (how much end users consume) by 40$ by 2030 compared to 2007 projections.
The reduction equates to around 960 and 740 million tonnes of oil equivalent.
Both directives passed comfortably through the parliament with votes of 418-109 and 469-93.
Additional reporting by Lauren Boland
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I am impressed, the journal did not turn it into a climate world is boiling.
@: climate change makes the work of arsonists easier. In Greece’s case, the boundaries of forest areas are marked but aren’t set law, so there’s an inventive to burn dowm and redraw forest boundaries by those that want to build houses, hotels and tourist resorts. About half of fires in Europe have a known cause, and of these just over half are arson.
@David Jordan: why are you trying to link climate change to arsonists?
@Shane Doyle: I think you’ll find the OP brought climate change into the discussion.
@Diarmuid Hunt: op says afp enough said..love their articles describing children killed in Palestine as 15 year old militants.
@David Jordan: next you will be telling me the Nazis had gas chambers. Your very easily led in fairness or your paid. One or the other.
In 2009, the public discovered emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit exposing how scientists who have been enormously influential in promoting the concept of man-made climate change actually attempted to cook the books to obtain results that served their narrative that the planet was heating at a dangerous trend due to higher levels of carbon dioxide. One of these scientists included Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA climatologist who is known by some as the “father” or “grandfather” of the climate change myth, as it was his “Model Zero” that first introduced the concept of global warming.
Hansen, Philip Jones, Michael Mann, et al. were all involved in trying “to lower past temperatures and to ‘adjust’ recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming,” according to the leaked emails. The emails also revealed how this cabal of scientists would discuss various ways to stonewall the public from seeing the “background data on which their findings and temperature records were based,” even going as far as deleting significant amounts of data. They would engage in efforts to smear “any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work.”
@: You’re / your. Anyone paying you needs a refund.
@Ken O’Neill: Even ExxonMobil scientists accurately predicted global warming back in 1977. Exxon’s scientists ran about a dozen sophisticated computer models nearly 50 years ago, and given the models are now nearly half a century old, it’s possible to see if their projections came true.
Exxon’s research correctly forecasted the globe would warm by around 0.2°C every decade.
Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S. and Oreskes, N., 2023. Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections. Science, 379(6628), p.eabk0063. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abk0063
Human caused Climate Change is not nonsense, it’s one of the most scientifically validated and important challenges we face. The first predictions of global warming were published in newspapers over 100 years ago, the science is not new, look at the evidence:
This graph shows the rapid rise in Temperature and CO2 for the last 2,000 years (0 – 2000 AD) perfectly overlap, showing that the CO2 we add to the atmosphere is driving global warming:
https://imgur.com/gallery/5ioVzFY
But instead of warning people, ExxonMobil buried the evidence and instead paid conservative think tanks to lobby against the science of human caused climate change.
For example, 40% of the total funds of The Heartland Institute, an American conservative and libertarian think tank that rejects of both the scientific consensus on climate change and the negative health impacts of smoking, came from from ExxonMobil between 1998 and 2007 e.g., ExxonMobil donated $119,000 in 2005 to Heartland, its biggest gift since 1998.
(The Heartland Institute was founded in 1984 and it worked with closely with the tobacco company Philip Morris throughout the 1990s in an attempt to discredit the health risks of second-hand smoke. Some of the same lobbyists that worked to defend tobacco company profits also lobbied against climate change related science)
See: Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science
Contrary to ExxonMobil’s sponsored disinformation there is an overwhelming 99% consensus that humans are responsible for global warming. It’s something we are responsible for and something we need to remedy.
Lynas, M., Houlton, B.Z. and Perry, S., 2021. Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters, 16(11), p.114005.
@Ken O’Neill: “Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA climatologist who is known by some as the “father” or “grandfather” of the climate change myth, as it was his “Model Zero” that first introduced the concept of global warming.”
No. The term Climate was first coined in 1975 by Columbia University geochemist Wallace Broecker. We see here, two papers dating from 1977, that used the term climate change:
Baes, C.F., Goeller, H.E., Olson, J.S. and Rotty, R.M., 1977. Carbon Dioxide and Climate: The Uncontrolled Experiment: Possibly severe consequences of growing CO2 release from fossil fuels require a much better understanding of the carbon cycle, climate change, and the resulting impacts on the atmosphere. American Scientist, 65(3), pp.310-320.
Schneider, S.H., 1977. Climate change and the world predicament: A case study for interdisciplinary research. Climatic Change, 1(1), pp.21-43.
Also, Eunice Newton Foote first demonstrated in 1856 that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it traps the Sun’s heat via en experiment with tube filled with CO2.
“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature,” wrote Eunice Foote in her paper titled Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.
And one of the first warnings that burning fossil fuels would cause global warming was published in Popular Mechanics in 1912:
“The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the Earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”
So we understood that CO2 warms the planet over 100 years ago, and scientists made predictions that burning fossil fuels and adding more CO2 to the atmosphere would warm the planet, decades before warming was noticed. This successful prediction, proves the theory that humans are causing global warming, is true.
@John Jon: john, will you ever pick a side, no wonder everyone takes the p I s s out of you.
@David Jordan: that was way too long to read tbh. But the narrative is shot in the arse when you look at all the companies involved. All the companies involved on the green and fossil side are shareholder controlled by blackrock , vanguard and state street. All the craziness in the world is being pushed by these lunatics and their investors. The climate communism, the woke rubbish etc… The public are not stupid. Nothing in the world has the right to take peoples freedom or force behavior. Its wrong and totalitarian. I will not comply and neither will most people.
@Shane Doyle: In utter desperation I assume?
@David Jordan: Long story short – Arson is not Global Boiling.
@Ken O’Neill:
.
The Climategate scandal was given new life in 2011, with the release of new emails. The new round of leaked emails at the time provided more teeth to the revelations of 2009. Here are a couple of egregious emails from Jones found, via Forbes:“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,” writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email.“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden,” Jones writes in another newly released email.
To all those Journal contributors relentlessly attacking those of us who highlighted the fact that these fires were in all probability started maliciously and not the result of “Global Warming” I want to say Thank You.
Thank You for offering us such a humble and contrite public apology.
For future reference:
Don’t believe everything the MSM tell you.
Use your CRITICAL FACULTIES and investigate properly before speaking.
Once again Thank You.
(Can’t be easy admitting you were duped so easily)
@Tommy Haze: David Jordan will be along with a 10 meter comment on how wrong you are.
@Eric Gaffney:
Haha!
Actually, I like Mr Jordan, he’s civilised and polite, not easily ruffled, reminds of those French civil servants who upon receipt of a towering stack of foldered paperwork, smile and rub their hands with glee.
@Tommy Haze: sorry to rain on your parade but only a minority of these fires were started maliciously. If you had bothered reading the article, you would have noticed this section: ‘Fire department spokesman Yiannis Artopios said 140 people had been arrested on suspicion of arson, most of it accidental. Most cases were related to welding and agricultural work that ignored high-risk weather warnings.’
Critical faculties… hahahahaha!. Very good.
@Tommy Haze: I like the comparison.
@ForrestG45:
.
Prove it or stfu.
Last week’s cOnSpiRaCy ThEoRy is this week’s news.
Again.
@Alan B: Not helping but not a deciding factor either. It should have been reported on. It was known weeks ago that arson will involved.
@Alan B: Those who mocked people for pointing that out on previous wildfire articles didn’t know that, clearly. The usual “come off facebook and youtube, climate denying tin foil hat wearing blah blah blah” crowd.
By everyone do you mean them too?
@Alan B: how dare you use plain logic in the journal comments! They won’t like that around here
Well thanks for finally reporting on this.
The big problem across Europe is forest management and leaving land in overgrown states
@john mac: (plus global warming, and lack of rain).
@john mac: Ahh that comment reminded me of the brilliant mind who suggested that the problem was that the forest floor should have been raked… Ahh pure gold…
It stands to reason that if you have an itinerant population lighting fires for cooking/heating water etc, out in the open then a fire can start extremely easily. This would explain the high migrant death count .
Arsonists should always get charged for attempted murder with long mandatory jail time…
I love increasing my carbon footprint every year :)
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