Just as noted in The Open Europe blog reconciling head count by different parts of the European Union is not easy. As at 23 August 2007 from the European Union’s official website Europa (Annex Part C) the draft 2008 general budget projects a 2.3% rise in staff head count from 42,545 in 2007 to 43,564. [...]

Technorati Tags: climate change, European Union German economics professor Hans-Werner Sinn has an eye-opening article on the Vox-EU-blog. According to the well-known economist, the EU’s policies to reduce fossil fuels consumption are insufficient as they forget about the supply-side of the energy market: “The European Union’s consumption-reducing measures will be in vain if oil sheiks [...]

For us West Europeans, unless we are on our vacations, the Aegean sea seems to be pretty far away, tucked away in one of the most remote parts of Europe. We prefer to think of it in terms of dream islands swimming on a warm sea. The truth is much more brutal than that: […]

The Open Europe blog estimated in January 2007 that around 54,000 staff worked in EU entities. The breakdown of these were: 42,548 Temporary and permanent EU officials 8,123 external Europeam Commission staff 2,254 extra European Parliament staff 1,075 other staff that Open Europe estimated

Reading through the stastics for the last 7 years relating to the top arms dealers in the world, you can’t ignore the role of Europe in the dealing of weapons around the world. True no country is a bigger merchant of arms than the US, followed by Russia. Yet after Russia the next three […]

Technorati Tags: biofuels, climate change Martin Wolf is without any doubt one of the best European economic journalists of his time, although I do not always agree with his neo-liberal “let’s leave everything to the market” politics. Today, the FT columnist launches a brilliant attack on the political support and subsidies for biofuels which he [...]

EurActiv writes today that French want their say on EU treaty “61% of French citizens would like to see a referendum on the ‘Lisbon Treaty’ set to be signed by EU leaders in December, according to a recent poll. However, President Nicolas Sarkozy remains determined to pass the document by parliamentary vote.” But the article [...]

Two articles in the Guardian are worth spending a bit more time on today. The first “Civilisation ends with a shutdown of human concern. Are we there already?” is by environmental journalist George Monbiot and deals with the UNEP’s recent report on the state of the planet. Read also my own recent comments on this [...]

The Environmental Audit Committee in the UK’s House of Commons looked at the governmental structures in place to deal with climate change and found them ineffective. In its new report “Structure of Government and the Challenge of Climate Change“, it recommends that the government create a cross-government Office of Climate Change and Energy and a [...]

One of the tragedies of our times is that countries which are lifting themselves out of poverty are doing this by making exactly the same mistakes Western economies made in the past. For all the talk in political circles of our current development not being sustainable, nobody really seems to give a shit. Like lemmings [...]

“Not an environment scare story” is the ironic title of the Independent’s coverage of the fourth Global Environment Outlook: environment for development (GEO-4) assessment published by the United Nations Environment Programme on 25 October. The report makes indeed for some pretty dire reading. Climate change, population explosion, declining availablity of water, biodiversity loss, growing pollution [...]

Several speakers at the “post-carbon society” conference organised by the Commission’s DG Research on 24 October underlined the need for stronger regulatory action to deal with the twin challenge of climate change and energy security. IEA chief economist Fatih Birol presented “a flavour” of the upcoming World Outlook 2007 (which will be presented in London [...]

The United States is the country that is always assumed to be the gung-ho cowboy in the world; always ready to pick a fight. It casts a shadow over the fact that every step of the way, European nations such as England, the Netherlands and various Eastern European nations… they too have joined the various [...]

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol might have been useful as a symbol for governments’ commitment to act against global warming but it has failed to reverse the trend or bring greenhouse gas reductions. This is the analysis of two British scientists writing in Nature this week. “Kyoto was always the wrong tool for the nature of [...]

A good friend from Chicago is visiting me in Amsterdam. Lately we have frequent conversations about his ancestors, many of whom came from Poland, escaping during world war 2. Many more of them did not escape and were sent to their deaths at concentration camps. As we spoke, I looked over his shoulder at the [...]