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July 3, 2013
Through the DG Environment Life programme, Friends of the Earth receives around three quarters of a million euros every year to spread bias and prejudice on European issues. This needs to stop.
July 2, 2013
The European Commission wants to know whether recycling targets in EU waste legislation need reviewing, and how. The consultation focuses on three Directives whose targets are under review: Waste Framework Directive / Landfill Directive / Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive. Each year in the European Union we throw away 2.7 billion tonnes of waste, 98 million tons of […]
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Climate & Environment, English, Science & Policymaking, Sustainable Dev. |
The EU suffers from the highest unemployment ever since its start half a century ago. Its political leaders have been unable to respond with appropriate medicines. But they are also increasingly unable to explain their citizens what the EU is all about, what it can do and where it is not competent. They are lost […]
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Climate & Environment, Energy, English, Science & Policymaking, Sustainable Dev. |
Green Week has come and gone for another year, and the most remarkable thing is that nobody noticed. This year I felt some sympathy for the event and the Commissioner for DG Environment, Janez Potočnik, who rightly described how we consider air qualit…
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English, Health & Consumers, Science & Policymaking, Sustainable Dev. |
May 21, 2013
The Risk-Monger’s Inbox overflows with invitations to next month’s Risk Summit in Dublin. The main reason he is giving this event a miss is that much risk research today has become tired, predictable and ineffective.
April 26, 2013
World Malaria Day 2013 came and went … and nobody cared. Greenpeace did not accept responsibility for the tens of millions of needless deaths, choosing rather to celebrate Cute Penguin Day instead. The Risk-Monger is ready to give up on evidence-base…
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Development Policy, English, Health & Consumers, Science & Policymaking, Sustainable Dev. |
April 18, 2013
One would expect European policy to promote jobs and competitiveness. But when most of the people influencing policy in Brussels have never worked in a company that makes things or provides services (and considers corporations as vulgar and immoral), s…
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English, EU Priorities 2020, Future EU, Science & Policymaking |
It is time for the European Environment Agency (EEA) to get serious and not let their activist dogma guide their publicly funded “research”. In their second version of Late Lessons from Early Warnings (Chapter 2), the EEA pretended to address the i…
January 23, 2013
A conversation between Robert Madelin and Marc Davis The boundaries of our physical and digital worlds are melting away at unprecedented speeds, leaving many of our policy-makers, heads of government and business people unprepared to integrate new conc…
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blogactiv, English, EU Priorities 2020, Future EU, InfoSociety, Innovation & Enterprise, Science & Policymaking |
December 7, 2012
According to the IEA, global green house gas emissions will have to decline substantially – from close to 40 billion tons in 2012 to only 23 billion tons in 2030 – to prevent average temperatures on earth from soaring beyond the 2009 international target of +2°C. Such a decline is most unlikely to take place. […]
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Climate & Environment, Energy, English, EU Priorities 2020, Science & Policymaking |
November 30, 2012
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol has been hailed as the first global climate agreement. But it has not been the success story that its champions have tried to make of it. It has taken three years to negotiate and another eight years, from 1997 to 2005, for entering into force. It has failed its objective of […]
November 24, 2012
Perfectly timed, one week before the start of the 18th international Climate Conference in Doha, the World Bank issued a dire warning that, without rapid and comprehensive action by the world community, Humanity will have to face a 4°C warmer world by the end of the century. This warning comes only four years after the […]
November 21, 2012
The 2012 UN Report on the State of the World Population contains good news. Global population growth is slowing down. For the period 2010-15 the UN expects an annual increase of only 70 million additional human beings compared to 80 millions around the turn of the century. Total fertility will decline to 2, the level […]
November 12, 2012
Intermittency of wind and solar energy are considered as major obstacles to the use of renewable energy: how to avoid power cuts during night or winter when there is neither wind nor sunshine? One answer are transnational grids, assuming that there will always be sunshine or wind in a broader geographical area. That is certainly […]
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Climate & Environment, Energy, English, EU Priorities 2020, Science & Policymaking |
Hurricane Sandy is the last clear cut example of climate change in action and a stark demonstration of the economic and human cost of extreme weather. Homes battered down by storms, crops ruined by floods and droughts all lead to significant economic loss. Climate change is estimated to have cost 1% of global GDP in […]
