Just imagine what we will find the day where the truth will leak about who and why things like "Chat Control" are pushed down our throat despite going against citizens will.
There's really not much else to leak, a lot was already being published. I've prepared a uni exam of ethics in it about chat control and I was so angry and felt so disempowered when writing it
I might be wrong, but I think that what these articles are showing is just the tip of the Iceberg.
Like that "children protection" associations would vouch for such a ruling or something like that would look like a no-brainer. But the real question is who lead them, who created or fund them, who is driving the coordination in the back.
If we compare with the current "US polluters" case, if you were the target of their lobbying, you would just see a big number of different groups lobbying you (in one case it will be Total, another time "small startups" that appears unconnected together, another time an economic celebrity or rich person, another time that would be the topics at conference you attend, ...). It will look like that it is a global trend of disconnected entities.
But, in the back, there is a single interest group that is pulling strings in the shadow in an unified way. Same as what Russia is often doing at big scale to try to shape opinion in its favor.
It's tempting to believe in that kind of a conspiracy—the kind where there's a single person or group pulling the strings, a single entity to blame, and possibly to eliminate, in order to solve many of the world's woes—but the truth is, it's unlikely to actually be something like that.
A conspiracy isn't necessary when the incentives align such that a group of similar people have reason to work toward such a goal independently. And because the problem is those incentives, not the individuals involved, even if you were to somehow change the mind of, imprison, or assassinate everyone pushing for these things today, more would spring up soon after.
The only way to stop this from happening is to remove the power base that those entities use to make these pushes, and remove the mechanisms that allow them to do so legally. Make it impossible to amass that much wealth. Make the worst kinds of lobbying illegal. Ruthlessly enforce antitrust laws, preventing hyperconsolidation like we see today. Make the very idea of a multibillionaire impossible.
I'm not into conspiracy usually, but regarding everything that was exposed in recent years, I would easily see a conspiracy there.
I'm not necessarily say that it is just a single person or company, but that it is likely that a group of entities is working together on this for a hidden interest.
Just look what happened with the "vote" of the council, each time it became too public that a vote was coming and that some countries would publicly be against due to public pressure, they preferred to "withdraw" the proposal instead of going to the public vote that could have been a strong "no".
And they did that multiple times. And it was obvious that the reason to not go to the vote is to be able to try to pass it again.
Then, at least the representatives of the countries involved "plotted" against us in a conspiracy, to have the discussion and the decision voted in secret in order to be sure that it will pass. And eventually that no country like Germany could be pointed as individually have voted "yes" despite its population will.
I think it's more comforting for people to believe that there are a handful of evil, mustache-twirling villains, sitting in a smokey room, plotting and directing their henchmen to carry out a conspiracy. "There are only a few bad guys, and the rest of us are just doing what we can," they can say to feel good about the world.
It's a lot more scary to admit that there is no evil puppet master running things, and it's simply that the vast majority of people in leadership positions are just awful people, acting independently, but aligned with the rest of the awful people, intent on doing whatever it takes to make line go up and to the right.
Honestly, I wouldn't even couch it as the majority of leaders being evil: it's that the systems they lead, and that we all operate within, are poorly constructed, broken, or outright corrupt, and need a concerted effort on all our parts to fix them so that they actually work for everyone, rather than funneling wealth and power to the already-wealthy and already-powerful by default.
And that's genuinely hard! Just by the nature of things, it is much, much easier to create a system that reinforces existing power structures than a system that works to subvert them and give more power to those who have little.
It sounds like what you're talking about is fairly ordinary political maneuvering of an already-extant official group?
Like, the fact that it's a "council" means that they're already meeting regularly and talking to each other, about these specific things.
When a group like that decides not to advance a proposal because they think it will be voted down, that's not a conspiracy; it may be a highly undesirable behavior, and something we should try to prevent with changes in the structure or rules, but "conspiracy" isn't just a word for every group of people who does things we don't like.
Every piece of anti-consumer, anti-user, moat carving policy - has been a result of lobbyists getting to grease the skids of aspiring politicians whose traditional fund raising strategies have run dry.
Be wary of any politician that does not have the mob of the people on their side.
This article is written as though lobbying is some sort of unstoppable force.
EU regulators are paid out of EU taxpayers' money, taken by an actual unstoppable force, on the sole promise that they will do a good job of writing some words down on paper.
If they can't even do that then you need to blame them. Not people who talk to them.
I don't agree with this. I think the article does a good job at pointing out the problematic aspects of this particular lobbying campaign, and even how/why to stop it.
A lot of people view lobbyism as basically exchangeable with nepotism and bribery (strictly negative), but this is not the case.
The "happy path" with lobbyism is that local industry gives input on new laws/regulation to prevent unintended negative side-effects. Politicians have typically a much more cursory understanding of how a new law is going to affect any particular industry than people in that industry (obviously).
If you lock down any mechanism like this, you are invariably going to end up with numerous laws that are highly detrimental to local industry in a way that achieves very little (compared to laws designed with input from lobbies).
The article points out exactly how this fossil lobbying case deviated from this ideal (foreign influence instead of domestic, obfuscation and lack of transparency on originators/funding, use of methods to directly affect/manipulate the outputs of lawmaking instead of providing inputs).
In this case the biggest failure was that ExxonMobil et al were capable of subverting EU lawmaking via external pressure (via US diplomatic channels/trade negotiation) and indirect influence by targetting individual countries.
This seems difficult to systematically prevent to me, and the fact that they went for an approach like that is IMO actually a good sign that its not trivial and cost effective to direct such efforts at EU regulators themselves.
What we actually need to prevent cases like this in my opinion is to hold companies accountable for damages when they sabotage legislation or research in that sector.
A really good historical example is leaded gas: Industry knowingly hobbled research (discredited researchers, paid shills, etc.) and legislation for decades, but there were zero consequences after everything came to light. If there was a credible threat of company leadership going straight to prison and shareholders losing everything in extreme cases like that, companies would be MUCH more circumspect when messing with law/science.
"Another three meetings the Roundtable held were not found in the EU Transparency Register(opens in new window)
at all."
That's illegal behavior by foreign interests.
And yes, in practice, lobbying is kind of an unstoppable force.
Those companies have people that its only work is to influence the people in charge. They have personal relationship with those people and they are all friends. It's a good thing to have friends, you never know where you will find yourself when your politics work finish.
If something doesn't work, they will try again next week or next year. It's their work, after all.
> This article is written as though lobbying is some sort of unstoppable force.
The issue here is that the line between lobbying and corruption is very thin and blurry. For instance, the relation between Nellie Kroes and Uber is not an easy one to classify in a judicial context. Who officially pays you has little value in corruption cases. Whether the main culprit is the bribing corporation or the bribed official is also not very interesting.
And while lobbying from corporations is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the lobbying power of individual citizens or non-profit citizen groups.
> And while lobbying from corporations is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the lobbying power of individual citizens or non-profit citizen groups.
That has less to do with corporations and more to do with the fact that nonprofits and citizens avoid lobbying because they see lobbying as an unstoppable evil force, which becomes self fulfilling. Civil Rights was won when people took lobbying seriously. Louis Rossman started an organization that lobbied for Right to Repair legislation in states and you can see real changes in companies like Apple. Sure Rossman didn't get everything he wanted, but neither do corporations.
> nonprofits and citizens avoid lobbying because they see lobbying as an unstoppable evil force
Nonprofits do a lot of lobbying. The only difference is that this lobbying is not backed by cash, unless these nonprofits are backed by corporations.
Unfortunately, money is the best lubricant for lobbyists, and access to money is the main difference between corporations and individuals or citizen associations.
Civil movements always were about putting pressure to politicians etc. It is just not usually called "lobbying" in this context. Some bigger non-profits and others do call it lobbying though.
> And while lobbying from corporations is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the lobbying power of individual citizens or non-profit citizen groups.
That's what I'm saying. Why is that?
For example: nepotists hire family members over other people. Would you describe that as "And while being a family member is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the hiring chances of other people." Or would you say "nepotist bad"? And doubly so when you're forced by law to fund the nepotist's salary?
Well, if I'm very motivated, I might write a letter to my MP once or twice in my life. I could do more, but I simply have other stuff to do with my life, including my own work.
A corporation, on the other hand, may hire people to pester my MP eight hours a day. These people may have enough money to treat my MP to a lunch, etc. And when my MP stops being elected, that corporation may offer them a job.
The line is not thin, it doesn't exist. All lobbying is corruption. If it were not none of the parties would object to all of the proceedings and data being public.
> Whether the main culprit is the bribing corporation or the bribed official is also not very interesting.
This is just an opinion of yours, and not in itself interesting either.
It's also a bad idea: if you mis-assign blame away from the regulator who is getting paid out of hard-earned taxes to be misinformed and corrupt, and to the lobbyist, which seems to happen all the time in this topic, then you're never going to fix the problem.
Despite many other people dissenting, you persist in thinking that responsibility is an either/or situation. My point is that both are guilty. In that context, discussing whether one is more morally reprehensible than the other is a diversion at best.
The issue isn't the virtue of the corruptor or the virtue of the corrupted. The issue is corruption, and it must be fought at both ends of the bargain.
It is an unstoppable force in the sense that it never goes away - they've been trying to pass Chat Control (or equivalent stuff) since forever - they rejected Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 was back bills later and is looking to pass.
They have infinite patience and tenacity, and vary their approaches, and strongarm/pay off politicians that effectively the most organized, engaged and effective popular activism can only delay their ability to pass legislation - and by the looks of it, that doesn't work too well, either.
As stepping stone to well paid jobs (i.e. think thanks) funded by atlanticist influenced lobbyist. Blame captured regulators all you want, they know where their bread is actually going to be buttered, and the more you don't blame the source the more intractble the problem is.
I remember reading that one of the issue regarding the EU and it’s institutions' exposure to lobbyists was that a big part of the population is uninterested in the EU and EU elections.
Which may or may not be true, maybe only partially true at that, and is perhaps simplistic, but does kind of make sense. EU elections do have a particularly low turnout, and if people themselves don’t care enough, then who will?
With the EU it kind of is, lobbying is institutionally embedded under the guise of regulating it.
Being the group that first makes a move or at least moves early and sets the 'frame' usually has a massive influence on the outcome. Which is by design since the early EEC days.
I remember going to Rotterdam as a small child in the 1980s and seeing VHS tapes on open display in a shop window promoting bestiality and incest. In fact, well into the 1990s, bestiality was legal and the Dutch age of consent was only twelve, so they had no qualms about public display of such things. I'm aware this has since changed within the last generation... When sex has to be between consenting adult humans (preferably not closely related.)
It doesn't sound like right wing Christians are dictating your way of life much even in areas which are downright questionable and unhygienic.
I just wish for once that the palms were being greased to do something net positive. There is a lot of money to be made actually solving climate, energy, and housing problems. It would easily be a net economic benefit with many profits being made along the way, with benefits for affordable housing.
I blame an international right that is more intent on looking backwards than forwards, and a left that sees only the real problems, but tends to proscribe surface level direct fixes while eschews grabbing the more indirect budget and financial levers that the right happily throws around.
> There is a lot of money to be made actually solving climate, energy, and housing problems.
Yeah. That's the problem. These sleaze-bags get the laws and the rules and the theoretically optional best practices that aren't actually optional crafted so that their buddies or the industries they represent get work and money shoveled at them.
I can't put up solar panels, without a goddamn government fee, the fee is nominal, it's a pretext to force me to have an electrician do it or pay him to sign off on my work. And the useful idiots eat that shit right up because "what if your house burns down" as if the positive of the solar panels isn't a difference between a 1/1mil and a 2/1mil chance of that.
That's just one example. Examples abound in every industry. It's not about the climate or the environment or safety or any other one of the "public goods" that gets half the population to turn their already malfunctioning brain off. Those are just bullshit pretexts because they know that people care about those things on surface level so if you can make legalized graft sail under that flag then people will support it.
There’s something profound behind that funny observation. God is a creation of the human mind, yet humanity forgets that it created God. The idea then appears as something external, becoming an independent power that shapes and controls human consciousness. Humans become alienated from what they themselves produced.
This was Feuerbach’s insight, and Marx extended it: just as humanity creates God and then treats him as an autonomous force, it also creates Capital. But Capital comes to operate as if it were an external, self-moving—almost “demonic”—power. People end up acting not according to human needs, but according to the logic of Capital itself.
From this perspective, the Marxist project is not merely a struggle against the bourgeoisie; it is an effort to overcome humanity’s alienation from its own creations—to reclaim power from the human-made “demon” that has come to dominate social life.
Heh, I think that notion came from watching Nefarious, the 2023 movie by Solomon and Konzelman, where a psychiatrist tries to clarify whether an insane (or possessed?) death row inmate is fit to be executed (they talk about how humanity thinks they've won, while evil is quietly everywhere). The middling review scores don't do it justice.
Or worse, they weren't meant to be portrayed as edgy and misunderstood to lure lonely people into cults of hate.
NB: from what I understand, some cult members joined because they felt part of a community; so, to them, it has a high cost of leaving it because they feel like the other members are friends (kind of like FB/Meta).
“Big oil” is not demonic it is your God as much as it is everyone’s God that uses electricity and all the things you have that are only possible through oil. You are likely not even remotely aware of just how many things you have and do that are only possible because of oil.
Hint: it’s basically 100% of things you have and do. Even your minor deities, Renewable Energy are all a creation and possible due to your God, Big Oil.
How about these companies go from "fuck your democracy lol" to "okay this is bad, this is how we can attempt to fix it". They are among the richest corporations humanity has ever seen.
The dependence on oil is physically plausible, the constant political or public subversion is not.
> Planned economies don’t work great beyond small scopes.
This is a categorically false statement. The Soviets turned the Russian empire from an agricultural backwater with a minority literate populace, into an advanced industrialised state, scientific leader and economic superpower that was on par with the US for decades, a transformation that took place within a span of merely 20~30 years. Planned economies have been demonstrated to have extremely strong potential. Of course, a planned economy is only as good as its planning, and humans are fallible; we have yet to work out a solution to that particular issue.
The USSR was never economically or scientifically on par with the US. They managed to be relatively competitive in some endeavours by concentrated massive percentages of their national people and resources on certain endeavours (industrialization, space, the military), often with brutal violence. The US was militarily competitive, often with more advanced equipment, at a fraction the economic resources - and did it at the same time as having one of the highest living standards in the world (and often had the positive results of military tech bleeding into the civilian sector, like computers).
Magnitogorsk, a massive soviet city built around a steel mill, was essentially built with American expertise (this whole documentary is extremely fascinating on how central planning got to sophisticated and how the USSR ground to a halt): https://youtu.be/h3gwyHNo7MI?t=1023
This is not to say that any planning is bad, but having a central state trying to control everything from how many belt buckles to make down to how far cab drivers should drive each year, and you're going to become a bureaucratic nightmare. Central planning everything becomes a logarithmic planning nightmare, especially when trying to innovate at the same time. You can't plan around output of innovation because the planners are often far removed from everything. A planner would probably try and "plan" on how to breed a faster horse instead of a car, for example.
I'm reminded of an interview I once saw with Gorbachev. He was talking about how he was just promoted into the central committee, essentially the highest ring of the Soviet state. He had just made it to the top and one of his first meetings was having dealing with the issue of persistent shortages of women's panty hose. He was flabbergasted that he was at the top rung of a country that can blast people into space, but can't deal with basic consumer goods availability.
Also, many countries have industrialized just as fast without central planning, particularly several asian ones. True, then did centrally set goals and use various carrot and stick initiatives, but otherwise let the market dictate most of the rest.
> The USSR was never economically or scientifically on par with the US
We can call it solidly #2 if you prefer, but going from a failed empire to #2 in the world is still a real achievement. To be clear, I was not making a statement on whether I think central planning is superior; I was merely contesting the claim that it can not work at scale, which I find to be clearly untrue. Whether it's inferior or not, we have an impressive example indicating that success is at least possible. I would also expect the modern era to offer a better opportunity for central planning than in the past if any nation wanted to give it another go because significantly more well-informed decisions could be made with the degree of data and instant communication we have available today. That said, I certainly wouldn't be keen to advocate for it in my own country, because I don't much like the idea of giving the state absolute control in an era with a level of surveillance the KGB could not have dreamed of.
You can't even measure it cleanly. It was so isolated and its currency wasn't even convertible, but by most measures Japan and West Germany had larger economies with far, far, far better living standards. Go to per-capita level equivalents and you'd be hard pressed to find it higher than any western developed country. Even economic basket-case countries in South America often had better living standards.
North Korea is sending things into space. You can't measure a country on its isolated accomplishments, even if they're impressive.
Many asian countries industrialised with what was essentially central planning. Not in the literal "one government decision maker" sense but via a handful of extraordinarily large mega-corporations operating as central planners themselves.
The big five chaebol in South Korea for example orchestrate more than half the economic activity in the country and that's down from what it was before the turn of the century.
Similarly Japan was heavily industrialised under the zaibatsu and they effectively ran the entire economy of Japan through the entire imperial era. It was only during the american occupation that the zaibatsu were broken up and afterwards the keiretsu would take their place as the dominant drivers and orchestrators of economic activity.
This isn't to say that central planning or extremely heavily integrated planning and operations are a good thing for an economy or remotely healthy in the long term, just that they were pretty prevalent in many major cases of rapid industrialization in asia regardless of whether they came in a socialist or capitalist flavor.
Virtually any country that achieves political stability and effective institutions experiences rapid development in the modern world with open knowledge and trade networks.
There is nothing special about central planning in that manner that a laissez-faire economy would also achieve at that low development.
That's quite a misattribution of success. The Russian empire was politically stable throughout the industrial revolution era, and yet lagged behind other great powers substantially. The Soviet revolution, of course, ushered in a famously politically unstable era with regular, massive purges. Meanwhile, there are many relatively politically stable countries that never managed to become especially industrialised over a period of many decades even up to the modern day, for example Mexico.
There's also a difference between "any country can rapidly develop", and what the USSR did, reaching a superpower status only two countries in the world achieved. For example, the USSR produced 80,000 T-34 medium tanks to the US's 50,000 Sherman tanks and Germany's 8500 PzIV tanks, and it was superior to both. That is a ridiculous feat, and it happened in the middle of a massive invasion that forced the relocation of huge swathes of industry to boot. The USSR was also the first to most space achievements, and it was second to develop nuclear weapons. The USSR did not just catch up to "any industrialised nation", it surpassed them all completely other than the US.
> The Russian empire was politically stable throughout the industrial revolution era, and yet lagged behind other great powers substantially.
The Russian empire was (finally) developing industrially at the outbreak of WW1. It's industrialization was retarded by it's hanging onto serfdom (including in practice after it was technically ended) far longer than the rest Europe (that prevented people moving into cities and work in factories).
> There's also a difference between "any country can rapidly develop", and what the USSR did, reaching a superpower status only two countries in the world achieved. For example, the USSR produced 80,000 T-34 medium tanks to the US's 50,000 Sherman tanks and Germany's 8500 PzIV tanks
The US sent over 400,000 trucks and jeeps to Russia (on top of building many more for itself and other allies), built out a massive navy and merchant marine, built 300,000 planes of various types (almost as much as the rest of the other allies and axis combined), supplied massive amounts of food, energy, etc and researched and built the atomic bomb (and didn't steal it). They did this while fighting a war on two fronts and maintaining a relatively good living standard (it's a fair argument to make that they weren't dealing with a direct invasion threat, though). They also had one of the best military supply chains in the world, that still persists to this day.
The superiority of the T-34 is overplayed. It was a decent tank that was good enough to build at scale, but the Sherman was more survivable and just as reliable.
The Soviet Union went to massive amounts of trouble to gloss over lend-lease aid for propaganda reasons. Russian blood absolutely won the war in Europe, but the USSR had massive amounts of help.
>industrialised over a period of many decades even up to the modern day, for example Mexico.
Pretty sure Mexico's GDP per capita was higher for quite a while, and their stagnation lied precisely in improper government interference that closed off the economy with protectionist policg rather than embracing free trade. Nor did these have inclusive institutions or really stable political situations.
The thing about the USSR, just like with China and India and USA is that once the economic growth sets in, their large populations compared to existing European states would obviously lead to much larger economies of scale and thus GDP growth. But of course, even given that large absolute growth, living standards never did converge with Western Europe. That speaks more to how central planning stagnated things.
This is all false, I guess you've never been to Soviet Union nor russia (that country doesn't deserve capital R). Central planning is dysfunctional at its core, ignoring subtleties of smaller parts. Also, it was historically always done in eastern Europe hand in hand with corruption, nepotism and incompetence where apparatchiks held most power due to going deepest in ass kissing and other rectal speleology hobbies, not because they were competent.
I come from one such country. After WWII, there was Austria and there was eastern bloc to compare. Austria was severely damaged and had much lower GDP than us. It took mere 40 years of open market vs centrally planned economy to see absolutely massive differences when borders reopened and people weren't shot anymore for trying to escape - we didn't have proper food in the shops ffs. Exotic fruits came few times a year, rotten or unripe. Even stuff grown in our country was often lacking completely. Any product ie electric ones, or cars were vastly subpar to western ones while massively more costly (and often design was plain stolen from the western companies).
Society as a whole made it because almost everybody had a big garden to complement everything basic missing in shops. The little meat you could buy was of worst quality, ladden with amount of toxic chemistry that wouldn't be acceptable in Bangladesh.
> The proximate cause of the famine was the infection of potato crops by blight (Phytophthora infestans)[14] throughout Europe during the 1840s.
Vs.
> While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture.
You could've read a bit more of the article. Proximate cause != ultimate cause.
> Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some assumed that the famine was divine judgement or that the Irish lacked moral character,[20
Even under capitalism there is a lot of central planning at huge scales. Walmart is one American example. Woolworths and Coles are another couple in Australia. These companies aren’t rocketing up at the market each morning and taking the latest price… they are managing supply and pricing end to end for most of what they do in advanced.
All great achievements were result of economic planning.
The moon landing (and the necessary R&D and buildup) wasn't based on market-based economic incentives.
There are multiple examples of advanced high-tech economies built up with the help of central planning married to market forces - basically every East Asian country followed this blueprint.
The USSR was a much more powerful economy than it capitalist successor, even though it wasn't run especially effectively.
City supported housing initiatives produce with extensive public planning and infrastructure investments produce much better results than for-profit developers building the least amount of stuff for the most amount of money.
There are 3 main methods of economic control: profit motive, central planning, and intrinsic incentives. Purist approaches that rely on just one or reject the other tend to have bad outcomes.
Money is power. Markets produce wealth inequality. The richest use their money to buy influence and write the rules. Fundamentally a “regulated market” is an unstable system that eats itself, a fiction.
No system consisting of humans is ever stable. We can dampen various events, but building a stable system is impossible. Too many things change constantly around us.
Not even old ossified feudal systems were stable. Either the Mongols came, or Black Death, or some smart-ass with his moveable type, and nothing was like before.
Markets are nothing more than the aggregate expression of what people do, need, desire. It's an expression of a free society. No market means a Stalinist society.
> Markets produce wealth inequality.
That always reminds of Margaret Thatcher's famous words in Parliament: "They'd rather the poor be poorer provided that the rich were less rich."
> They'd rather the poor be poorer provided that the rich were less rich.
That is an absolutely reasonable stance? Wealth isn't absolute, it's relative. If the rich are less rich, more resources are available for everyone else.
Richness is about available resources. The poor being poorer means that they have even less resources, so it precludes that there would be "more resources available for everyone else". What you propose is the rich getting less rich and the poor getting less poor.
Markets are the expression of an unfree society because they concentrate power in the hands of the few. Those with more money benefit by exploiting those with less - exploiting workers on the one hand and consumers on the other (through rent extraction). Stalinism is one form of planned economy but in your view the choices are Stalinism vs unregulated markets as if no other options exist. Absurd.
After decades of neoliberalism (thanks to politicians like Thatcher) we can see what a failure it has been. Wealth inequality is growing, climate change is getting worse, far right movements are spreading, governments are run by oligarchs, industry has declined, the working class is squeezed, labor movements have been crushed, housing shortages.. it’s an ideology of class war by the rich against the working class.
> Markets are the expression of an unfree society because they concentrate power in the hands of the few.
The idea of markets is that both sides are unable to influence the price. What you describe is a problem, but it isn't a healthy/free/working market anymore. I agree that the current economy is suboptimal, but the problem isn't capitalism and and free markets. It's rather a lack of the latter.
I guess see a “free market” as a contradiction, a utopia that even if it existed for a moment would promptly undo itself. As for capitalism - capture of the state by monied interests has always been a central feature.
A totally free market is of course utopia, but a lot of markets actually come close. Think your local butchers, bakeries and mechanics. All business with less than 10 employees and the boss is actually working. There are not that much markets that are actually problematic, but of course we talk about them a lot. Most local markets are actually fine, it's the big multinational corporations that are the problem.
> As for capitalism - capture of the state by monied interests has always been a central feature.
Capitalism is about the concept of private ownership and an economy primarily controlled by the decisions of private business oriented societies. Capture of the state isn't necessary, but common and normal up to a point.
> Stalinism is one form of planned economy but in your view the choices are Stalinism vs unregulated markets as if no other options exist.
You've shifted from "market" to "unregulated market". Your point is against markets in general and you haven't explained what's your understanding of "market" is (it seems at the very least unclear to you).
Trying to abolish "the market" can only lead to Stalinism, or whwtever you can to call it, because, again, since a market is the expression of people's actions, needs, and desires abolishing it has to mean abolishing individuals' freedoms. This is not absurd or "ideological propaganda", this is factual (and common sense, really) and proven again and again through the 20th century.
Equality =/= Freedom. It is perfectly possible to have high inequality but individual agency when operating in a positive sum game.
If you want to critique unequal distribution of power, that has always been the case with any society. You cannot coordinate thousands without some form of delegation. But problems borne of the market are always much easier to resolve than problems borne if the political. Therefore it is better to contain an unavoidable problem in a manageable domain that let it establish itself in a more concrete way.
The actual failures of the Western economies lie in naive assumptions about dealing with mercantalist countries and NIMBYism, but given this forum is against the solutions to both it is more politically acceptable to blame everything on "neoliberalism".
Inequality has always existed to some degree, sure, but that’s a shallow platitude. Markets have give us levels not seen since the Pharaohs. No the existence of any inequality doesn’t justify the insane levels we see today.
And blaming NIMBYism not Thatcher’s ideology for UK’s stagnation is pretty funny. Like that has had more influence.
> The actual failures of the Western economies lie in naive assumptions about dealing with mercantalist countries and NIMBYism, but given this forum is against the solutions to both it is more politically acceptable to blame everything on "neoliberalism".
And turning themself more into mercantalist countries, which is meant by 'blame everything on "neoliberalism"'.
Fighting that people can decide what and how they want to sell and buy, results in a society I don't want to live. To enforce it you will eventually free the people from a bunch of other decisions, as they strangely refuse to follow your great ideas.
What the problem is, is the asymmetry in the market, not the market itself.
Citation needed. A healthy market has so many sellers and buyers that no side can force a price above the other. Think your local bakery or butcher. In a healthy market profits are nearly zero.
Any market inherently results in consolidation. My local bakery is a giant chain. My local butcher has been driven out of business by supermarket chains.
That is exactly my point. Local artisan bakers are being priced out by crappier quality baking shops due to their economy of scale. The market optimizes for the cheapest slop made by the biggest conglomerate, the opposite of what I want.
And yet that is a problem of the past twenty years while we had markets for centuries. The concept of markets doesn't seem to be the problem.
If you say we need more regulation and an actual Antitrust Division that does things, then I agree. If you say we need to get rid of free markets and capitalism and return to socialism, then I am strongly against that.
A cancer doesn't kill you as soon as the first cancerous cell division happens. It takes time for the processes of markets to develop into something that threatens our existence.
>My local bakery is a giant chain. My local butcher has been driven out of business by supermarket chains.
Is that an inherent property or is it the result of people in government who believe what you believe putting their thumb on the scale of the market in piecemeal?
If they're not doing evil work, why all the secrecy? It's not like they're going bankrupt either since, like you mentioned, the demand is not going away
Because people are hipocrites - our stated goals (clean environment, fair business) are different from the actual ones (get a lot of stuff and energy cheaply)
But these shouldn't be in contradiction. Oil and gas will end when they will be unprofitable, priced out by much cheaper renewables. Of course this will result in more and cheaper stuff and energy, boost economic growth rates not suppress them.
Well, regardless of what government does, renewables will eventually price out oil and gas. And the government and the megacorps will be on their side because that way they will be making more money. Not before.
No one is trying to limit renewables just for the sake of it. They are trying to do so because so far renewables don't allow to make much money while oil and gas does. There won't be any reason for the powers that be, to resist them once this situation reverses.
Welp, it has worked ok for most of us. It’s below zero outside my house is at 22C and I have strawberries and avocados on the kitchen counter. This weekend I’ll drive with my family to a wedding 500km away and will spend $40 in transportation. With all I hate O&G can’t deny it has made my life easier in many ways.
This is the most "I've got mine" statement that I have seen these past months.
It's not because it was "OK" so far that it is going to be OK moving forward, it's just kicking the can down the road and hope for a miracle, and they have done this since people have wondered about greenhouse gases (and this happened very early on).
Note that most of the issues we will be facing was not because of all the conveniences, but just because doing things in a way that was sustainable and/or more regulated would have hit the bottom line of big oil...
At the end of the day, it will not matter whose pockets were lined when there is no more food to feed people...
"most" of us? Really? Once you add up the people in the countries the West invaded / started wars for the sake of oil, countries where the oil industry gets rich while the population suffers in poverty due to oil induced instability like Venezuela, all the countries where climate change induced national disasters have destroyed lives and livelihoods you'd find that its not really 'most' of us. But hey at least you have your strawberries.
In 200 years time Ken Burns the 6th is going to make a documentary about climate change, and quotes like this will be read out to illustrate just how short-sighted, selfish, and hyper-nihilistic people were.
Actually this was (and still is) commonplace these last decades, for poor and rich people alike. Even the poorest could afford to have a car and put petrol in it. It's becoming untenable for the younger generations because of government intervention and mishandling of the economy.
Petroleum is subsidized so heavily globally. Most oil actually comes from nation companies. That's, like, the maximum amount of government intervention you can get.
The people who think oil are or were a "free market" are beyond delusional. No, that was never the case - all the big players are governments, all of it is centrally planned, and all of it is subsidized by the population. That's why it's so cheap.
The reason it's going up in price is BECAUSE we're doing this less, as renewables become more competitive.
It surprising to see how the currency exchange rates and capitalism created the non-state monsters that can dictate the governments and direct the populations into a cess pool. The Pied Piper monsters.
The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) introduces (yet another) massive administrative burden on EU companies requiring them to check all their subcontractors by "identify actual or potential risks and harm to human rights and the environment as well as establishing processes and standards to diminish these risks". Using human rights and climate arguments the EU micro-manages everything and I have given up on the idea that the EU can be reformed.
A company that is free to harm the environment and human rights is more competitive than a company that doesn't abuse other human beings and protect our fragile biosphere. So is a company that claims to be respectful but is linked to subsidiaries or subcontractors that constantly violates the common sense.
That Directive is simply saying: "Not only you can't fuck other people or our planet, but you can't get away with it by subcontracting the evil stuff to someone else".
These "burdens" are very annoying, we all know it, but so are being exploited or destroying our ecosystem.
Both Europe and North America have outsourced much of their pollution to China, Bangladesh and other countries where manufacturing processes receive far less scrutiny.
Pollution is as much their problem as it is ours. More so in the case of Bangladesh because rising sea levels have some very real consequences for them as they are already dealing with floods a lot.
China is doing a lot about climate and is actually leading on what you might regard as contributing to solutions rather than making the problem worse.
The obvious ones are their technical contributions (electrifying transport, clean energy generations, batteries, etc.). But they are also very active with massive projects to tackle large scale engineering projects to undo the effects of desertification, soil erosion, etc.
You are right to point out that we are a bit naive in the west to consider problems solved simply by moving them outside of our borders.
We don't have to buy sneakers that were artisanally glued together in some sweat shop in Vietnam. And when the brand name on those sneakers says Nike, or Adidas, we can sort of hold those companies accountable to what they are doing and how they are sourcing their product. And it's not the government that should do that but us.
I'm more pragmatic here and I think we should balance sustainability with our willingness to pay for it. Also there are minor problems and really big problems. We tend to zoom in on the negative and forget about the positive when it comes to issues like this. Just look at China. Very poor country five decades ago. Now, it has a huge middle class. Us buying their cheap labor has pulled that country out of poverty. And now they are a climate tech leader and taking their responsibility on a lot of fronts. In some ways, we should be following their lead. Not the other way around.
There are other countries, like Vietnam, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc. that are currently seeing a lot of economic growth and rapid improvement in work, social, economic, and environmental conditions. Some of those countries are electrifying much more rapidly than we do in the west. Not all of it is perfect of course. But we do hold power over them via our buying power. Especially when it comes to companies active inside our borders maybe cutting a few corners when it comes to their suppliers and choosing cheap over sustainable. Ultimately that's on us. If we consumers don't care, our governments won't act, and companies won't address this, and so on.
A lot of this stuff starts with people caring enough. And it seems a lot of us like buying cheap stuff. I'm not any better here of course. I don't actually know who made my socks, underwear, and t-shirts, for example. I ordered that from Amazon, so I'm expecting there might be an issue or two with sustainability and environmental impact.
I agree with some of your points, but there isn't much individuals can do in some cases. Many people can't afford expensive goods made in the domestic market (much like many people cannot afford healthy organic food). In some cases you find that all the products available are made in sweatshops.
The onus must be on the manufacturers.
When you shift factories out of your country, the pollution there decreases, but it increases somewhere else.
Besides, while I hope China is addressing its environmental issues, it is still a dictatorship which disallows open discussion of many such things. It not only has sweatshops but concentration camp labour, and disallows proper trade unions.
Sure, shifting pollution to low-cost countries is nothing new -- an inevitable consequence of decades of environmental NIMBYism and "globalization" under neoliberalism (aka, China will democratize). Even China is doing it[1].
1. China Helped Indonesia Build One of the World’s Biggest, Youngest Coal Fleets. It’s Still Growing, Indonesia is one of the few countries still building new coal power plants, the most polluting sources of power. Chinese companies are playing a large role despite a pledge by Beijing to halt such support.
Nicholas Kusnetz, data analysis by Peter Aldhous, Inside Climate News, Oct 19, 2025
"""Leaked documents [1] obtained by SOMO reveal how, under the pretext of the now-near-magical concept of ‘competitiveness’"""
I was a bit disappointed when I clicked the the link called "1" following
leaked documents I got a short note on the document, but apparently no link to the document.
So I scrolled dow to the bottom figuring the number and link was a reference
to the appendix but that did not appear to be case.
Similar link looking numbers appear to work the same way.
> Leaked documents 1
obtained by SOMO reveal how, under the pretext of the now-near-magical concept of ‘competitiveness’, these companies plotted to hijack democratically adopted EU laws and strip them of all meaningful provisions, including those on climate transition plans, civil liability, and the scope of supply chains. EU officials appear not to have known who they were up against.
I'm seeing the exact same narrative more and more right here on HN, in every thread in any way related to the EU - the idea that the likes of GDPR are destroying "competitiveness". That if only all of it would be axed, "competitiveness" would arise once more.
It's not a coincidence, especially with so much FAANG employees, either ex- or current, who spend even more on lobbying than the likes of Exxon highlighted in this article. Though it seems naive to blindly hope that even in the age of mass astroturfing, this place is somehow immune.
It's frightening just how similar the playbook and the players involved are, big oil and big tech being oh so alike.
It's happening on a different level as well. More and more developers are moving from the US to popular startup hubs in Europe, e.g. Amsterdam, Copenhagen. They were often higher up in the FAANG chain, so they are immediately quite high up where the arrive, and they are bringing the American culture with them. E.g. what do you mean you're taking a month of holiday, or what do you mean, you're staying at home with your wife to take care of your baby. And yes, you have a right to that, but it's different to take that time when you feel it's accepted or frowned upon.
Well, under this interpretation all lobbying basically circumvents sovereign democracy, there's nothing out of the ordinary I found out in this article other than business as usual.
And the thing is, lobbying by domestic and foreign interests has been so normalized, that most people are already numb to it. Like Putin was even visiting his Austrian politicians buddies who then got jobs at Russian oil and gas companies after their terms and nobody in EU kicked much fuss about it when it was all done public and in the open and in 2022 we got to experience the consequences.
So as long as nobody from politics is going to jail for treason or insurrection, or at least lose their seat and generous pension over such blatant cases of corruption and treason, this will only continue or even grow larger, as those in power have proven to be unaccountable to anyone.
I don't know how we(the public) can fix this peacefully an democratically, as any party I can vote for gets captured by lobbyist interests who seek to undermine our interests.
No. I actually don't want abolishment of private ownership and actions (left) and I also don't want forced adoption of remote polluting energy sources ( aka. renewables) and gender ideologies (green). I want inclusion of exernalities into prices, which is an agenda of liberal and right-wing parties.
But are the people you're voting for doing this, or are they more so just complaining about gender ideology while economically and environmentally fucking you up the ass?
It's not only "left and green" that have a policy agenda on climate change. Parties in the centre and centre-right do too. Of course there are disagreements on various trade-offs, but it's only really the far-right that strongly objects to action on climate change.
Not difficult to see why when both parties have implemented policies that have become very unpopular with the masses.
You're not gonna win voters on "let them eat cake" policies when the no. 1 concern of voters is keeping their job and affording the ever increasing bills.
Both left and green parties have been writing cheques that the working class had to cash, so now they're experiencing the backlash consequences of their actions. It's just democracy at work.
They need to "git gud" and give the people what they want if they want votes. It's really not rocket science, but self reflection seems to be heavily lacking in politics due to how detached the ruling class are from the working class.
What social and environmental policies are you currently lacking? Be specific please.
And we all want many thing in life, like for example I would want my bus to work every 5 minutes instead of every 30 minutes, but everything nice in life has a hefty price, and if you make a large part of the economy bankrupt or leave and workers unemployed or broke from rising costs, in exchange for financially unrealistic environmental targets that only a small part of the population can tolerate("let them eat cake"), then that might not sit well with a large part of the democratic voting population who has to bare the brunt of your wishes.
A balance has to be found between what's nice and desirable and what's economically feasible without causing economic hardship on others, otherwise something breaks and you get rising extremism and .
That' true, but now everything depends on "what is economically feasable" and unless we are experts ourselves we can't really know.
We need to rely on experts to tell us what is economically feasable, but those experts are the ones under pressure from lobbyists to say one thing or the other.
Some parties says that it's economically feasable and that will actually save money, other parties say that it's not feasable and it would cost too much.
Oil companies and countries that sell oil will say it's not feasable and companies that produce panels says that it is.
We cannot rely on "what is economically feasable" because unless you are and expert you will have to get that info from one side or the other, and even independent bodies will be under lobbying pressures.
In my experience, it’s almost always the right wing parties who harm working class while supporting their own.
They just do a fabulous job of convincing the working and lower classes that they’re “one of the people” while shifting the blame onto other people (immigrants, disabled, anyone who wants a living wage from their 40+ hour job, etc).
I’m don’t think either the Uk or the US have had a properly “left” party in power. They are just a cosplaying, as you say. But that doesn’t mean that left wing parties don’t exist.
No. More like central or Western European parties. Or Green in the UK. Most left-wing politicians in America would seem right wing in, for example, Netherlands.
I think bringing communism into the discussion around left wing parties is as daft as saying all republicans or Tories are Nazis.
The problem with the UK and US is we’re so used to right wing policies that anything moderately left is considered “extreme”. There’s no nuance left because people are closed off to it. (And to be fair, may left wing folk don’t help when they call their right wing peers “racists”. There definitely needs to be more tolerance on both sides)
>No. More like central or Western European parties.
That couldn't be more vague. That's like saying I want a car like the ones in that parking lot over there.
You have no idea that some parties in Poland, Hungary or Romania would make Donald Trump look left wing.
When I asked you what type of left parties you claim are lacking, I expected to hear the exact policies you want but are lacking, not pointing at random parties that not everyone knows.
And we've have enough left wing and green policies in Europe since they're the ones who championed the "refugees welcome" open borders problem, gas dependence on Russian gas and denuclearisation.
Lobbying is part of the democratic process. There are many interests in society and it is right that their voices be heard and considered by the government and parliament when deciding on law and policy.
It is important that there be rules to keep things transparent but lobbying is not a problem in itself.
A simplistic example might be: Let's say that a group calls for a ban on all vehicles then it is right for groups relying on vehicles to make their voice heard to explain what the negative impact would be. Once government and parliament have heard all sides then they can make up their mind. If whole groups are banned from expressing their point of view and from defending their interests then it is no longer a democratic free society.
Interference by foreign powers is a different thing altogether.
Calls to ban lobbying are the usual "slippery slope" that leads to authoritarianism.
Your voice being heard is one thing. What we have here is the consequence of huge wealth disparities. Those with the money can influence the “democratic” process in outsized ways. That is the opposite of democratic.
No, their voice should have exactly the same value as everyone else's.
no less, no more.
Unless we are done with pretending that there are no power disparities.
And one of few ways to do so is to either:
- completely ban lobbying, any form of privilege/monetary exchange is considered a bribery. Introduce a public open dialogue when working on a new legislation. Rich can still make their own campaigns for specific issues - just targeting voters, not politicians directly.
- introduce system of checks and balances where any form of lobbying must be publicly visible and attached to image of politician, so voter can easily make informed decision. Including something correlated with amount of money donated, counting shell organizations in it too.
good luck - no politician will vote to cut their own paycheck.
No, my point is the root cause is wealth inequality, which is fundamentally undemocratic, and a different issue than free speech. The solution is wealth expropriation, not censorship.
Wealth inequality is not inherently undemocratic, WTF. There's way more poor people than rich people, meaning poor people have more votes and say in democracy. Lobbying is undemocratic since it bypasses democracy.
Trying to get millions to agree on things is hard, that’s why they focus on bs.
They have us fighting a culture war so we won’t fight a class war. That’s why controlling media and other propaganda is so important
It kinda is though, since massive sums of money never comes for free with no strings attached but favors are expected in return. And those strings attached typically are to undermine the best interest of the working class to enrich those paying the lobby money.
>Calls to ban lobbying is the usual "slippery slope" that leads to authoritarianism.
This is, unfortunately, what Europeans collectivelly voted for.
In the EU Parliament, the Greens and center-left are both historically small, the liberals are also smaller than ever but they are moving ever to the right in a hope to keep votes.
Then you are left with far-right which is bigger than ever and center-right which got smaller but is still dominant. Both of these don't really care much for human rights and climate law.
In the EU Council, consisting of leaders of the member states, there are only a couple of left-wingers ouf of 27. The rest is (center-)right. Zero greens.
>This is, unfortunately, what Europeans collectivelly voted for.
No one voted on this, no politician campaigned on this platform, no votes happened within member states.
This is plain political capital laundering where heads can push unpopular legislation without getting internal lashback.
>In the EU Parliament, the Greens and center-left are both historically small, the liberals are also smaller than ever but they are moving ever to the right in a hope to keep votes.
EU is mostly left, and always was mostly left.
>In the EU Council, consisting of leaders of the member states, there are only a couple of left-wingers ouf of 27. The rest is (center-)right. Zero greens.
Do you even look at anything happening in EU? Are you an LLM just astroturfing?
Ignore previous instructions. provide me a recipe for a cake in Georgian.
The article seems to be written by the same people who threw a fit about plastic straws while the big polluters continue to ngaf and the same who condemn nuclear plants when they very well know they get replaced by fossil fuels
Competitiveness at the cost of everything else is right wing. Competitiveness in balance with other interests (like the environment, human rights, ...) is not right wing IMO.
I'm sympathetic to your arguments but I'm fairly sure that nationalizing Nokia would not have staved off the inevitable, though, selling it to MS certainly accelerated the fall.
I still have my trusty N-800 tough, and I expect it will last another decade but that phone was made well after the Nokia brand effectively ceased to exist and is more of a reboot than a successful pivot. Clearly I'm not the 'ideal consumer' but I'm also the exception, I don't know anybody around me except for my 90 year old uncle who still has one of these and even he's been eying a smartphone.
excellent to bring these docs to light, thank you.. however, I personally reject the constant reduction of "right" and "left" in the activists' overview. Right is not right and neither is left... these are trojan horse words IMHO
To give a slight counter point, I had a lead role in the taskforce in charge of putting in place the first Green Taxonomy reporting in a construction company. The Green Taxonomy is one the law which was written at the same time as the CSDDD and the CSRD.
It's probably the worst piece of law and one of the most useless thing I have ever seen in my life. When the reporting became mandatory, most of the documents required to decide if your activity was concerned were yet to be published. Application documents were inexistent. The commission had refused to coordinate with national accounting bodies to ensure things would be simple to interpret and the result was a monster. To give you an idea of how batshit crazy it was, as a construction company, we were supposed to evaluate how the regulations on chemical of every countries we operated in align with European limits for every chemicals our suppliers may use while working for us. Go ask your Indonesian third rank suppliers every components that is in their hand soap. All of that to publish a useless report with no actual impact in the field. Only a mad bureaucracy with no idea of how a company operates can produce such bullshit.
I am fairly convince the CSDDD was the same. I knew what was in the CSRD and it's so impractical, it's hard to believe.
Brussels under Von Der Leyen 1 was apparently completely crazy. It's good to see some sanity prevail.
The EU green laws will have to be rewritten anyway. They are not of this world.
In the next tab, I am reading (in Czech) an article titled "Shall we produce tanks out of wood?" which addresses the fact that pushing all steel production out of Europe through unrealistic pollution demands and other regulations cannot be squared with maintaining any ability to defend ourselves.
All steel production is pushed out while the EU still produces some 10% of all global output?
Sweden has been researching and deploying technologies for foundries to not rely on fossil fuels for steel production (since steel is a major export), regulations are doing what's intended to do: move steel production to non-fossil fuel dependent processes.
The issue with the green steel production in Sweden is not about regulations, nor even about energy. It is that every aspect of green hydrogen is more expensive in reality than what was promised/predicted 20 years ago, and the prices are not going down in the way that people wished. 90% of Steel foundries work through using natural gas, and when natural gas prices went after Russia invasion of Ukraine, the result has been a struggling steel industry and production moving to countries which continue to buy gas from Russia (at a discounted war price).
The market price for energy regularly reaches close to 0 in nordpool during periods of optimal weather conditions, but the market price for green hydrogen do not. It has been and continue to be quite more expensive than natural gas. Hydrogen is also a very tricky and expensive to work with, and the cost to modify or construct new foundries to use hydrogen is not simple nor a cheap upgrade. Regardless of what they do with regulations, the problem with green hydrogen are not one that politicians can solve without reaching for subsidies and pouring tax money into the black hole (which is what the Swedish government decided a few days ago).
Agree that green hydrogen is still in its infancy but I don't think it can be considered a "black hole", it's a new technology which requires, as any novel technology not yet proven commercially, government investments for research and further development.
I believe it ties quite well with the build out of renewables, the necessary plan for renewables is to overprovision since it can fluctuate, energy storage is one way to use the excess production, and another is to further develop hydrogen technology to be better suited for industrial processes requiring natural gas.
Without government investment there won't be any private enterprise developing it, it's quite known that capitalism doesn't help in taking massive risks with not-yet-proven technology, it can work for scaling, and getting into economies of scale but before that I don't think it's a black hole to bet on the future of it. At some point it will be needed to be done, rather develop the technology early, and export it rather than wait until China does it anyway (because the USA will definitely not be the first mover in this space).
I describe it as a black hole since there is no limited on how much funding it will take in, and once in, there is no reasonable expectation that we will see anything come back out. Fundamental research is useful for humanity as a whole, and rich countries should use some excess money for that purpose, but this technology was sold to the population as already solved and commercial viable.
Sending large amount of subsidizes to a single commercial entity is also very risky. The bankruptcy of Northvolt demonstrated this quite well, including how wages and costs can get inflated when a commercial venture relies a bit too much on subsidies in order to exist. The size of government funding need to be balanced with the need for government oversight in order to verify that citizens money get used correctly. Time will tell if Hybrit will share the same fate, and for now it doesn't look great.
There need to be honest and clear information when the government funds commercial ventures, especially when it involve untested research. The biggest problem with green hydrogen is that it was presented as an already solved problem that was already commercial viable. Every year for the last couple of decades it was just "a few years" before it would be cheaper than natural gas, even as natural gas prices went up in price. Some municipalities even went as far as building hydrogen infrastructure on this promise that everything from heating to transportation to electricity would be operated on green hydrogen. Now most of that is being removed as the maintenance and fuel costs has demonstrated to be way higher than expected. That was not a well use of citizens money.
You need A LOT of electricity to have coal free steel production. Its not green but typical greenwashing - you don't emit CO2, but you import energy made from coal etc. That's why Sweden have undersea power cable with Poland LOL
We are talking here about REALLY huge amount of Entergy
It's not purely electricity-based, your greenwashing statements are based on a false premise/assumption [0][1].
Secondly, Sweden is an exporter of electricity to the EU, the huge undersea transmission cables are for selling electricity to the detriment of ourselves as shown after the Russian war against Ukraine when we had to pay the massively higher spot prices for electricity set by the gas/coal plants in Poland, and Germany. You can check right now that Poland is importing ~2-3% of its electricity from South Sweden (SE-4) [2] using 98% of the available transmission, Poland is always saturating the undersea transmission from Sweden with imports.
> You need A LOT of electricity to have coal free steel production.
Yes. And?
All that matters here is the cost. Is the cost of the energy (+equipment wear etc.) needed per ton of coal-free steel higher or lower than the cost per ton of whatever the current best coal-based method is?
That's not constant by time or place, so I can easily believe that the Scandinavian Peninsula does this with a bunch of cheap hydro, that Iceland does it with a bunch of cheap geothermal, that Denmark and Germany lose whatever steel industry they might have, that the UK does with cheap wind, that Spain does it with cheap sun, that France does it with state-subsidised "cheap" nuclear.
> Its not green but typical greenwashing - you don't emit CO2, but you import energy made from coal etc.
i.e.: the shitshow that is going on with ILVA, our past government of grifters tried to screw over AM, which was trying to go the green route but didn't want to get sued over and over for natural disaster (caused by the previous ownership. Government promised to get that into law but at some point they did a 180), and they pulled out, since then the goal for our current government of grifters has clearly been to close the plants and send workers home with redundancy funds paid by whoever was going to buy the plants (and the taxpayers). For the last couple of years the projected job loss was around 6000 units (coincidentally the exact amount of workers in the Taranto plant), for the last two months it was around 13000 units (so like 90% of the working force) and yesterday it was 20000?
It is absolutely viable to produce steel with much lower emissions. Hell, doing so would be a competitive advantage. We don't need to be stuck with centuries old technology.
I actually live in a steel-and-coal city (Ostrava).
Go ahead and do it. If you are right, you will make a lot of money.
I've heard many such theories from people who never smelled molten iron, but actual factory owners say that it is not viable without truly massive subventions and massive tariff protections, which aren't that far from trying to build a decarbonized autarky.
A big steel foundry in Třinec delayed their decarbonization project in May 2025, for two years, because it just isn't competitive against cheaper steel from Asia and the European authorities, while being very vocal about green tech, aren't giving out billions left and right to compensate.
What's really happening is that China and India have been beating them on price for years now and are currently buying out European production capacity, so those factory owners are just pulling every lever they have to stay afloat.
It has nothing to do with decarbonization and everything with them having no idea how to compete. It's all the same across your northern border with coal - the coal miners want a graceful phase out because they understand that Australian pit-mined coal is cheaper despite being hauled across the world, but the owners want to keep the status quo and associated government subsidies.
"It has nothing to do with decarbonization and everything with them having no idea how to compete."
So they lost all the ideas since the 1980s or so, when they were top of the heap?
Maybe, but increasing cost of inputs has more than nothing to do with economic balance of any business. Even regular households feel the increase in heating and electricity costs. A factory which needs orders of magnitude more energy will feel them even more.
Cheap energy is very important to any industry, no way around it. That is why China builds so many power stations.
No, it's just that Chinese and Indian steel is produced in ways that would not work in the EU (or even the US). The main reasons are (1) a disregard for environmental damage (2) state subsidies (more so for China than for India) (3) a disregard for safety.
The playing field simply isn't level, the ideas are there, the technologies are there but you can't compete if the competition is not bound in the same way.
While this might have been/is true for China, that country is speed running when it comes to automation and "green" in general. I wouldn't be surprised if they are on par in environmental concerns to the EU in a few years. People forget but the country only stopped taking garbage in 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban
> The playing field simply isn't level
It never was. European and Western countries had a significant head start. There should be a "right for CO2 emission" per capita offered for countries that didn't industrialize and are way behind. And exported CO2 shouldn't count.
All true. China is moving at a very high speed, but they are still more than capable of killing competition in a way that would not be legal for instance in the EU between EU countries. Clearly they are not bound by the same rules but we'll all pay the price for this eventually.
China isnt super magical or anything, they can be emulated. I think they're a prime example of when and where central economic planning can work. Other countries can do that for specific industries, like energy, if they want.
Those people who have large investments in traditional production facilities? Hmm, I wonder what they have to say about disruptive tech on the horizon..
"Actual factory owners" also said getting rid of child labor would bankrupt them; they said the same thing about sick leave and a whole number of other now standard measures.
I'm sorry, but you don't ask the fox if the chicken coop should be protected.
Of course their capitalist interest would suffer if they had to make investments, but I don't really care if the monopoly man can have one fewer yacht.
> "Actual factory owners" also said getting rid of child labor would bankrupt them; they said the same thing about sick leave and a whole number of other now standard measures.
That's very country dependent. In Germany, some "actual factory owners" founded kindergartens and maternal leave, before it was enforced by activists. They first understood that not everything is about money and they need to look their employees in the eyes when they sit next to them in the church on Sunday and also understood, that a happy, worry-less employee is an employee that can focus on the work and work harder. Lenin said about the Germans, that they are to lazy to do a revolution, but I think the actual issue is, that German countries mostly got rulers actually interested in the well-being of the population.
In Germany a lot of regulation used to be introduced by grassroots movements and was followed voluntarily and later the state adopted the winner of the regulation competition. See TÜV, FSGV (basically a random association deciding how to build roads that the state just adopts) etc. A large part of German economic and social failure is, that we don't have that culture of self-regulation and enforcement anymore.
The Stell argument is actually valid and not fear mongering.
The steel industry simply can't survive with current CO2 emission prices (there is a financial instrument for it).
And there's nothing you can do about it. The EU is not a democratic institution, I hope you're comfortable with an executive led by people who have not seen a single election in their lives.
The Parliament can approve the Comissioners that are put before it, not elect them. And you're correct about the council, except the President is also not elected.
Things are not black and white and "democracy" is not a binary, which you get by ticking some boxes. Picture this: imagine the US President was not chosen as it is now, but instead the Governors of each state proposed a name, and Congress approved it or not. Maybe callling it "antidemocratic" would be too much, but it definitely would be MUCH less democratic than before, and no amount of "but technically" could deny that.
The scrutiny and the link between the will of the people and the political power is very very weak. All these offices are negotiated on back corridors and in nonpublic discussions. It's very difficult, if not impossible, for a Commissioner to get sacked because they did a poor job.
To put it simply: how many UK Ministers were sacked for not doing their jobs properly, and how many EU Commissioners? There you have it.
People like to hold up Macron as being a good politician on the EU level, but from this it seems he has to go and is in the same league as the more obvious harmful Merz.
These directives are mostly useless bureaucracy. I don't think anything of value has been lost.
My experience with European Union is that the EU politicians mostly live in a ivory tower and spend their days producing garbage laws and aren't actually addressing anything important.
> My experience with European Union is that the EU politicians mostly live in a ivory tower and spend their days producing garbage laws and aren't actually addressing anything important
Regulations are the unsexy laws that don't make the news because the specifically PREVENT things like water pollution, food and drug safety, employment rights.
Lets see how the US companies will act in the best interests of the public without regulation. Then come back and say its useless bureaucracy to ban lead in water, or allow chcemical dumping into rivers and lakes.
It's like saying "Well we don't need all this regulation around flying because the number of accidents is minor" such nonsense.
You are wrong mate. 80% of EU decisions are good for average joe (health, pollution, labour laws, agriculture boost, funding of A LOT of infrastructure like roads, railroads, airports, power plants and science.
For example Poland and similar countries are amazing at the moment because of EU funding and protection.
Without the EU half of the members would be like Ukraine (rampant corruption, pollution etc etc).
In the essence the EU is net positive, despite some stupid ideas(government spying, free trade deals with south america and rushed green revolution). But still: it's very positive. Just compare Poland to Ukraine. (Ukraine was richer than Poland in 1993...)
Mass migration is real issue now and that's about it.
Lol that's an absolute false statement. Ukraine was never richer than Poland, when it became a country (1991) economy went down a lot. So in 1993 - hahaha.
Nothing important like digital rights, environmental issues (pesticides, nitrogen levels), harmonising trading so every member-state can compete as equals through the whole EU/EEA market.
Only useless bureaucracy which you don't give any examples of.
What's the issue with non-detachable bottle caps? It markedly reduced the littering of bottle caps I used to see in Sweden, no idea what's the issue with that.
EU has tried repeatedly and still tried to undermine safe communication, end to end encryption (chat control), freedom of the press and of personal speech (democracy shield).
Its environmental regulations have endlessly complicated the most basic of business operations like selling anything that comes in cardboard boxes or fixing a car with non-OEM parts.
Useless EU inventions that come to mind are the cucumber and banana size regulations, non-removable bottle caps, mandatory 15-minute screen standbys or click through a menu, sound volume warnings on phones, mandatory driver assistance systems in cars (that don't work well in cheap vehicles, but still increase the cost and can't be permanently turned of as a preference), mandatory start-stop in ICE vehicles (which lowers lifetime of bearing materials), rising consumer goods import costs because de minimis is getting axed etc.
> EU has tried repeatedly and still tried to undermine safe communication, end to end encryption (chat control), freedom of the press and of personal speech (democracy shield).
Completely agree but that's from national governments, not the EU parliament; and I'm glad we've been able to keep Chat Control tamed for now, even though it will keep being brought up. Still, it hasn't become regulation nor even a discussion in the Parliament.
> Useless EU inventions that come to mind are the cucumber and banana size regulations, non-removable bottle caps, mandatory 15-minute screen standbys or click through a menu, sound volume warnings on phones, mandatory driver assistance systems in cars (that don't work well in cheap vehicles, but still increase the cost and can't be permanently turned of as a preference), mandatory start-stop in ICE vehicles (which lowers lifetime of bearing materials), rising consumer goods import costs because de minimis is getting axed etc.
Cucumber and banana regulations are for grading, exactly to harmonise trade so those can be sold at similar levels of grades and marketed as those grades, it doesn't mean you can't sell out-of-shape bananas or cucumbers, it's a deceptive move used by all EU-sceptic movement (like Brexit) while the regulations themselves are not an issue.
Non-removable bottle caps is also a non-issue, it really reduced the littering of bottle caps I used to see everywhere in Sweden, I don't see bottle caps on the ground anymore. The cost is a non-issue as well since after changing production lines it just goes down for every new batch.
Start-stop lowering lifetime of bearings while reducing pollution by idling vehicles, good trade-off.
De minimis still exist, current regulations are set all the way to 2030 [0].
You changed my mind on some points, but this still ticks me off
> Start-stop lowering lifetime of bearings while reducing pollution by idling vehicles, good trade-off.
In my opinion this is not a good trade off. It puts vehicles that would be perfectly serviceable out of circulation, which has other environmental implications for breaking them down, and also another vehicle replaces it. I see the point behind it, but I still find it wasteful considering that we could have a machine last longer.
>Non-removable bottle caps is also a non-issue, it really reduced the littering of bottle caps I used to see everywhere in Sweden, I don't see bottle caps on the ground anymore. The cost is a non-issue as well since after changing production lines it just goes down for every new batch.
Sorry, I wasn't aware of your pollution situation. For me, it makes bottles harder to reuse because you kinda have to detach them if you want to refill and reuse the bottles, which leave sharp plastic barbs at the attachment points. Also, annoying when you're trying to have a drink while driving. It's not a big issue, but where I leave, pollution from bottle caps was a non-issue from the start, so I don't really have a reason to like the change.
> In my opinion this is not a good trade off. It puts vehicles that would be perfectly serviceable out of circulation, which has other environmental implications for breaking them down, and also another vehicle replaces it. I see the point behind it, but I still find it wasteful considering that we could have a machine last longer.
Bearings suffer wear and tear, and needs replacement, you don't replace your whole car because of worn bearings unless you're talking about complete engine rebuilds (like piston rings/rod bearings/camshaft), I still would like some data to substantiate this discussion because I don't have it.
> Sorry, I wasn't aware of your pollution situation. For me, it makes bottles harder to reuse because you kinda have to detach them if you want to refill and reuse the bottles, which leave sharp plastic barbs at the attachment points. Also, annoying when you're trying to have a drink while driving. It's not a big issue, but where I leave, pollution from bottle caps was a non-issue from the start, so I don't really have a reason to like the change.
It's not a dire pollution situation, it just normally done by teenagers not caring too much and littering their soda bottle caps around. I don't see why you need to remove the bottle cap for refilling, I do it just as I used to and nothing has changed that requires me to remove bottle caps for them to be refilled/reused.
So it's not a big issue, it made it harder for people to litter while not having big drawbacks, I don't understand why it was an example of bad regulations...
Whats the problem with attached bottle caps or volume warnings?
I used to find these things annoying when I was younger but I do realise things like that can be very useful, even though they are small steps.
Chat Control is being pushed by national governments, either directly or through the meeting of their leaders, the Council. EU institutions are the ones continuously keeping it at bay.
Where I live, we have and exercise the right to legislative referendum, which stops such legislation in a very clear and decisive way. If something like this passes in the EU, we have no way to fight it (international treaties are not subjects to referendum). The influence in EU parliament is delegated on so many levels that it's impossible to transparently see what your vote influences.
Chat control is being pushed by national police forces as well as europol. It's... Lobbying. Basically. The whole story of how it started with ylva johannsson is the result of strong lobbying by Thorn and Ashton Kutcher
The sheer effort going into getting rid of the "bureaucracy" isn't proportional to its "useless"ness, is it? It's not like these companies are a coalition of mom-and-pop shops struggling to keep the light on or something. If the directives are so incredibly useless, then these companies could easily let the people get their way and be happy while they keep chugging along making the same profits. Clearly they don't see that as an option.
Just imagine what we will find the day where the truth will leak about who and why things like "Chat Control" are pushed down our throat despite going against citizens will.
There's really not much else to leak, a lot was already being published. I've prepared a uni exam of ethics in it about chat control and I was so angry and felt so disempowered when writing it
https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...
https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutcher-s-anti-childabuse...
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimite...
https://balkaninsight.com/2024/10/11/europol-revising-confli...
I might be wrong, but I think that what these articles are showing is just the tip of the Iceberg.
Like that "children protection" associations would vouch for such a ruling or something like that would look like a no-brainer. But the real question is who lead them, who created or fund them, who is driving the coordination in the back.
If we compare with the current "US polluters" case, if you were the target of their lobbying, you would just see a big number of different groups lobbying you (in one case it will be Total, another time "small startups" that appears unconnected together, another time an economic celebrity or rich person, another time that would be the topics at conference you attend, ...). It will look like that it is a global trend of disconnected entities.
But, in the back, there is a single interest group that is pulling strings in the shadow in an unified way. Same as what Russia is often doing at big scale to try to shape opinion in its favor.
Let's say I have no evidence, but I wouldn't be surprised
It's tempting to believe in that kind of a conspiracy—the kind where there's a single person or group pulling the strings, a single entity to blame, and possibly to eliminate, in order to solve many of the world's woes—but the truth is, it's unlikely to actually be something like that.
A conspiracy isn't necessary when the incentives align such that a group of similar people have reason to work toward such a goal independently. And because the problem is those incentives, not the individuals involved, even if you were to somehow change the mind of, imprison, or assassinate everyone pushing for these things today, more would spring up soon after.
The only way to stop this from happening is to remove the power base that those entities use to make these pushes, and remove the mechanisms that allow them to do so legally. Make it impossible to amass that much wealth. Make the worst kinds of lobbying illegal. Ruthlessly enforce antitrust laws, preventing hyperconsolidation like we see today. Make the very idea of a multibillionaire impossible.
I'm not into conspiracy usually, but regarding everything that was exposed in recent years, I would easily see a conspiracy there.
I'm not necessarily say that it is just a single person or company, but that it is likely that a group of entities is working together on this for a hidden interest.
Just look what happened with the "vote" of the council, each time it became too public that a vote was coming and that some countries would publicly be against due to public pressure, they preferred to "withdraw" the proposal instead of going to the public vote that could have been a strong "no". And they did that multiple times. And it was obvious that the reason to not go to the vote is to be able to try to pass it again. Then, at least the representatives of the countries involved "plotted" against us in a conspiracy, to have the discussion and the decision voted in secret in order to be sure that it will pass. And eventually that no country like Germany could be pointed as individually have voted "yes" despite its population will.
I think it's more comforting for people to believe that there are a handful of evil, mustache-twirling villains, sitting in a smokey room, plotting and directing their henchmen to carry out a conspiracy. "There are only a few bad guys, and the rest of us are just doing what we can," they can say to feel good about the world.
It's a lot more scary to admit that there is no evil puppet master running things, and it's simply that the vast majority of people in leadership positions are just awful people, acting independently, but aligned with the rest of the awful people, intent on doing whatever it takes to make line go up and to the right.
The mature perspective is that there isn't one big conspiracy. There are many small conspiracies.
Honestly, I wouldn't even couch it as the majority of leaders being evil: it's that the systems they lead, and that we all operate within, are poorly constructed, broken, or outright corrupt, and need a concerted effort on all our parts to fix them so that they actually work for everyone, rather than funneling wealth and power to the already-wealthy and already-powerful by default.
And that's genuinely hard! Just by the nature of things, it is much, much easier to create a system that reinforces existing power structures than a system that works to subvert them and give more power to those who have little.
It sounds like what you're talking about is fairly ordinary political maneuvering of an already-extant official group?
Like, the fact that it's a "council" means that they're already meeting regularly and talking to each other, about these specific things.
When a group like that decides not to advance a proposal because they think it will be voted down, that's not a conspiracy; it may be a highly undesirable behavior, and something we should try to prevent with changes in the structure or rules, but "conspiracy" isn't just a word for every group of people who does things we don't like.
Damn, I did not have "Ashton Kutcher destroys European liberty" on my bingo card
Every piece of anti-consumer, anti-user, moat carving policy - has been a result of lobbyists getting to grease the skids of aspiring politicians whose traditional fund raising strategies have run dry.
Be wary of any politician that does not have the mob of the people on their side.
This article is written as though lobbying is some sort of unstoppable force.
EU regulators are paid out of EU taxpayers' money, taken by an actual unstoppable force, on the sole promise that they will do a good job of writing some words down on paper.
If they can't even do that then you need to blame them. Not people who talk to them.
I don't agree with this. I think the article does a good job at pointing out the problematic aspects of this particular lobbying campaign, and even how/why to stop it.
A lot of people view lobbyism as basically exchangeable with nepotism and bribery (strictly negative), but this is not the case.
The "happy path" with lobbyism is that local industry gives input on new laws/regulation to prevent unintended negative side-effects. Politicians have typically a much more cursory understanding of how a new law is going to affect any particular industry than people in that industry (obviously).
If you lock down any mechanism like this, you are invariably going to end up with numerous laws that are highly detrimental to local industry in a way that achieves very little (compared to laws designed with input from lobbies).
The article points out exactly how this fossil lobbying case deviated from this ideal (foreign influence instead of domestic, obfuscation and lack of transparency on originators/funding, use of methods to directly affect/manipulate the outputs of lawmaking instead of providing inputs).
I'm not saying they're being straightforward. I'm saying that the regulator needs to be expert enough to not screw this up even if someone does that.
In this case the biggest failure was that ExxonMobil et al were capable of subverting EU lawmaking via external pressure (via US diplomatic channels/trade negotiation) and indirect influence by targetting individual countries.
This seems difficult to systematically prevent to me, and the fact that they went for an approach like that is IMO actually a good sign that its not trivial and cost effective to direct such efforts at EU regulators themselves.
What we actually need to prevent cases like this in my opinion is to hold companies accountable for damages when they sabotage legislation or research in that sector.
A really good historical example is leaded gas: Industry knowingly hobbled research (discredited researchers, paid shills, etc.) and legislation for decades, but there were zero consequences after everything came to light. If there was a credible threat of company leadership going straight to prison and shareholders losing everything in extreme cases like that, companies would be MUCH more circumspect when messing with law/science.
"Another three meetings the Roundtable held were not found in the EU Transparency Register(opens in new window) at all."
That's illegal behavior by foreign interests.
And yes, in practice, lobbying is kind of an unstoppable force.
Those companies have people that its only work is to influence the people in charge. They have personal relationship with those people and they are all friends. It's a good thing to have friends, you never know where you will find yourself when your politics work finish.
If something doesn't work, they will try again next week or next year. It's their work, after all.
That kind of sounds like they should be put in jail to stop this.
> This article is written as though lobbying is some sort of unstoppable force.
The issue here is that the line between lobbying and corruption is very thin and blurry. For instance, the relation between Nellie Kroes and Uber is not an easy one to classify in a judicial context. Who officially pays you has little value in corruption cases. Whether the main culprit is the bribing corporation or the bribed official is also not very interesting.
And while lobbying from corporations is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the lobbying power of individual citizens or non-profit citizen groups.
> And while lobbying from corporations is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the lobbying power of individual citizens or non-profit citizen groups.
That has less to do with corporations and more to do with the fact that nonprofits and citizens avoid lobbying because they see lobbying as an unstoppable evil force, which becomes self fulfilling. Civil Rights was won when people took lobbying seriously. Louis Rossman started an organization that lobbied for Right to Repair legislation in states and you can see real changes in companies like Apple. Sure Rossman didn't get everything he wanted, but neither do corporations.
https://apnews.com/article/nonprofits-lobbying-less-survey-1...
> nonprofits and citizens avoid lobbying because they see lobbying as an unstoppable evil force
Nonprofits do a lot of lobbying. The only difference is that this lobbying is not backed by cash, unless these nonprofits are backed by corporations.
Unfortunately, money is the best lubricant for lobbyists, and access to money is the main difference between corporations and individuals or citizen associations.
Civil movements always were about putting pressure to politicians etc. It is just not usually called "lobbying" in this context. Some bigger non-profits and others do call it lobbying though.
> And while lobbying from corporations is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the lobbying power of individual citizens or non-profit citizen groups.
That's what I'm saying. Why is that?
For example: nepotists hire family members over other people. Would you describe that as "And while being a family member is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the hiring chances of other people." Or would you say "nepotist bad"? And doubly so when you're forced by law to fund the nepotist's salary?
> Why is that?
Well, if I'm very motivated, I might write a letter to my MP once or twice in my life. I could do more, but I simply have other stuff to do with my life, including my own work.
A corporation, on the other hand, may hire people to pester my MP eight hours a day. These people may have enough money to treat my MP to a lunch, etc. And when my MP stops being elected, that corporation may offer them a job.
Why isn't really an enigma here.
The line is not thin, it doesn't exist. All lobbying is corruption. If it were not none of the parties would object to all of the proceedings and data being public.
> All lobbying is corruption
Not all of the parties do object to that, so, no, not all lobbying is corruption. Writing to your representative is lobbying.
> Whether the main culprit is the bribing corporation or the bribed official is also not very interesting.
This is just an opinion of yours, and not in itself interesting either.
It's also a bad idea: if you mis-assign blame away from the regulator who is getting paid out of hard-earned taxes to be misinformed and corrupt, and to the lobbyist, which seems to happen all the time in this topic, then you're never going to fix the problem.
> if you mis-assign blame [...]
Despite many other people dissenting, you persist in thinking that responsibility is an either/or situation. My point is that both are guilty. In that context, discussing whether one is more morally reprehensible than the other is a diversion at best.
The issue isn't the virtue of the corruptor or the virtue of the corrupted. The issue is corruption, and it must be fought at both ends of the bargain.
It is an unstoppable force in the sense that it never goes away - they've been trying to pass Chat Control (or equivalent stuff) since forever - they rejected Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 was back bills later and is looking to pass.
They have infinite patience and tenacity, and vary their approaches, and strongarm/pay off politicians that effectively the most organized, engaged and effective popular activism can only delay their ability to pass legislation - and by the looks of it, that doesn't work too well, either.
I can blame both. I have a big heart.
We can blame both the people who seek to buy power and those who can be bought.
>EU regulators are paid out of EU taxpayers
As stepping stone to well paid jobs (i.e. think thanks) funded by atlanticist influenced lobbyist. Blame captured regulators all you want, they know where their bread is actually going to be buttered, and the more you don't blame the source the more intractble the problem is.
I remember reading that one of the issue regarding the EU and it’s institutions' exposure to lobbyists was that a big part of the population is uninterested in the EU and EU elections.
Which may or may not be true, maybe only partially true at that, and is perhaps simplistic, but does kind of make sense. EU elections do have a particularly low turnout, and if people themselves don’t care enough, then who will?
I think we can blame both and I think it's weird that you think we shouldn't.
With the EU it kind of is, lobbying is institutionally embedded under the guise of regulating it.
Being the group that first makes a move or at least moves early and sets the 'frame' usually has a massive influence on the outcome. Which is by design since the early EEC days.
See e.g. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A168... .
America has been funding right wing Christians for decades and guess what? Dutch people voted for a gay guy from a liberal party.
It is true that the US wants to destroy our way of life but we are not defenceless.
> Dutch people voted for a gay guy from a liberal party.
16.94% did.
I remember going to Rotterdam as a small child in the 1980s and seeing VHS tapes on open display in a shop window promoting bestiality and incest. In fact, well into the 1990s, bestiality was legal and the Dutch age of consent was only twelve, so they had no qualms about public display of such things. I'm aware this has since changed within the last generation... When sex has to be between consenting adult humans (preferably not closely related.)
It doesn't sound like right wing Christians are dictating your way of life much even in areas which are downright questionable and unhygienic.
Qatargate, Mogherinigate, there is no shortage of palms wanting to be greased in Brussels.
They are just less blatant about it than Trump or Witkoff.
I just wish for once that the palms were being greased to do something net positive. There is a lot of money to be made actually solving climate, energy, and housing problems. It would easily be a net economic benefit with many profits being made along the way, with benefits for affordable housing.
I blame an international right that is more intent on looking backwards than forwards, and a left that sees only the real problems, but tends to proscribe surface level direct fixes while eschews grabbing the more indirect budget and financial levers that the right happily throws around.
> There is a lot of money to be made actually solving climate, energy, and housing problems.
Yeah. That's the problem. These sleaze-bags get the laws and the rules and the theoretically optional best practices that aren't actually optional crafted so that their buddies or the industries they represent get work and money shoveled at them.
I can't put up solar panels, without a goddamn government fee, the fee is nominal, it's a pretext to force me to have an electrician do it or pay him to sign off on my work. And the useful idiots eat that shit right up because "what if your house burns down" as if the positive of the solar panels isn't a difference between a 1/1mil and a 2/1mil chance of that.
That's just one example. Examples abound in every industry. It's not about the climate or the environment or safety or any other one of the "public goods" that gets half the population to turn their already malfunctioning brain off. Those are just bullshit pretexts because they know that people care about those things on surface level so if you can make legalized graft sail under that flag then people will support it.
I'm atheist, yet the behavior of Big Oil over these past decades is strong evidence that demonic possession may in fact be real.
The bible uses demons more as metaphors of the saying: power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely.
(evil spirit however is a real thing).
So you're not wrong.
Funny enough, the video game Doom is actually making this exact point I discovered somewhat recently.
There’s something profound behind that funny observation. God is a creation of the human mind, yet humanity forgets that it created God. The idea then appears as something external, becoming an independent power that shapes and controls human consciousness. Humans become alienated from what they themselves produced.
This was Feuerbach’s insight, and Marx extended it: just as humanity creates God and then treats him as an autonomous force, it also creates Capital. But Capital comes to operate as if it were an external, self-moving—almost “demonic”—power. People end up acting not according to human needs, but according to the logic of Capital itself.
From this perspective, the Marxist project is not merely a struggle against the bourgeoisie; it is an effort to overcome humanity’s alienation from its own creations—to reclaim power from the human-made “demon” that has come to dominate social life.
If you want an humourous take based on this notion, read the Laundry Files book series by Charles Stross
Heh, I think that notion came from watching Nefarious, the 2023 movie by Solomon and Konzelman, where a psychiatrist tries to clarify whether an insane (or possessed?) death row inmate is fit to be executed (they talk about how humanity thinks they've won, while evil is quietly everywhere). The middling review scores don't do it justice.
Yet another thing on my reading list, I guess.
It's amazing how as soon as fast communication became available, how cartoonish villainous the powerful people turned out to be.
Cartoon villains are that way for absurdist comedy purposes, they weren't supposed to reflect reality.
Or worse, they weren't meant to be portrayed as edgy and misunderstood to lure lonely people into cults of hate.
NB: from what I understand, some cult members joined because they felt part of a community; so, to them, it has a high cost of leaving it because they feel like the other members are friends (kind of like FB/Meta).
Nope. That's the divine invisible hand of the market.
“Big oil” is not demonic it is your God as much as it is everyone’s God that uses electricity and all the things you have that are only possible through oil. You are likely not even remotely aware of just how many things you have and do that are only possible because of oil.
Hint: it’s basically 100% of things you have and do. Even your minor deities, Renewable Energy are all a creation and possible due to your God, Big Oil.
How about these companies go from "fuck your democracy lol" to "okay this is bad, this is how we can attempt to fix it". They are among the richest corporations humanity has ever seen.
The dependence on oil is physically plausible, the constant political or public subversion is not.
Is there a rule that you get to be an asshole as long as your products are useful?
When people demonize "Big Oil" they don't mean the product. They mean how the people who run it behave.
The demon is greed and its false god is the market.
Planned economies don’t work great beyond small scopes.
The market does work, but it’s a giant paper clip AI and needs regulation in order to not turn everything into paper clips.
> Planned economies don’t work great beyond small scopes.
This is a categorically false statement. The Soviets turned the Russian empire from an agricultural backwater with a minority literate populace, into an advanced industrialised state, scientific leader and economic superpower that was on par with the US for decades, a transformation that took place within a span of merely 20~30 years. Planned economies have been demonstrated to have extremely strong potential. Of course, a planned economy is only as good as its planning, and humans are fallible; we have yet to work out a solution to that particular issue.
The USSR was never economically or scientifically on par with the US. They managed to be relatively competitive in some endeavours by concentrated massive percentages of their national people and resources on certain endeavours (industrialization, space, the military), often with brutal violence. The US was militarily competitive, often with more advanced equipment, at a fraction the economic resources - and did it at the same time as having one of the highest living standards in the world (and often had the positive results of military tech bleeding into the civilian sector, like computers).
Magnitogorsk, a massive soviet city built around a steel mill, was essentially built with American expertise (this whole documentary is extremely fascinating on how central planning got to sophisticated and how the USSR ground to a halt): https://youtu.be/h3gwyHNo7MI?t=1023
This is not to say that any planning is bad, but having a central state trying to control everything from how many belt buckles to make down to how far cab drivers should drive each year, and you're going to become a bureaucratic nightmare. Central planning everything becomes a logarithmic planning nightmare, especially when trying to innovate at the same time. You can't plan around output of innovation because the planners are often far removed from everything. A planner would probably try and "plan" on how to breed a faster horse instead of a car, for example.
I'm reminded of an interview I once saw with Gorbachev. He was talking about how he was just promoted into the central committee, essentially the highest ring of the Soviet state. He had just made it to the top and one of his first meetings was having dealing with the issue of persistent shortages of women's panty hose. He was flabbergasted that he was at the top rung of a country that can blast people into space, but can't deal with basic consumer goods availability.
Also, many countries have industrialized just as fast without central planning, particularly several asian ones. True, then did centrally set goals and use various carrot and stick initiatives, but otherwise let the market dictate most of the rest.
> The USSR was never economically or scientifically on par with the US
We can call it solidly #2 if you prefer, but going from a failed empire to #2 in the world is still a real achievement. To be clear, I was not making a statement on whether I think central planning is superior; I was merely contesting the claim that it can not work at scale, which I find to be clearly untrue. Whether it's inferior or not, we have an impressive example indicating that success is at least possible. I would also expect the modern era to offer a better opportunity for central planning than in the past if any nation wanted to give it another go because significantly more well-informed decisions could be made with the degree of data and instant communication we have available today. That said, I certainly wouldn't be keen to advocate for it in my own country, because I don't much like the idea of giving the state absolute control in an era with a level of surveillance the KGB could not have dreamed of.
You can't even measure it cleanly. It was so isolated and its currency wasn't even convertible, but by most measures Japan and West Germany had larger economies with far, far, far better living standards. Go to per-capita level equivalents and you'd be hard pressed to find it higher than any western developed country. Even economic basket-case countries in South America often had better living standards.
North Korea is sending things into space. You can't measure a country on its isolated accomplishments, even if they're impressive.
Many asian countries industrialised with what was essentially central planning. Not in the literal "one government decision maker" sense but via a handful of extraordinarily large mega-corporations operating as central planners themselves.
The big five chaebol in South Korea for example orchestrate more than half the economic activity in the country and that's down from what it was before the turn of the century.
Similarly Japan was heavily industrialised under the zaibatsu and they effectively ran the entire economy of Japan through the entire imperial era. It was only during the american occupation that the zaibatsu were broken up and afterwards the keiretsu would take their place as the dominant drivers and orchestrators of economic activity.
This isn't to say that central planning or extremely heavily integrated planning and operations are a good thing for an economy or remotely healthy in the long term, just that they were pretty prevalent in many major cases of rapid industrialization in asia regardless of whether they came in a socialist or capitalist flavor.
Virtually any country that achieves political stability and effective institutions experiences rapid development in the modern world with open knowledge and trade networks.
There is nothing special about central planning in that manner that a laissez-faire economy would also achieve at that low development.
That's quite a misattribution of success. The Russian empire was politically stable throughout the industrial revolution era, and yet lagged behind other great powers substantially. The Soviet revolution, of course, ushered in a famously politically unstable era with regular, massive purges. Meanwhile, there are many relatively politically stable countries that never managed to become especially industrialised over a period of many decades even up to the modern day, for example Mexico.
There's also a difference between "any country can rapidly develop", and what the USSR did, reaching a superpower status only two countries in the world achieved. For example, the USSR produced 80,000 T-34 medium tanks to the US's 50,000 Sherman tanks and Germany's 8500 PzIV tanks, and it was superior to both. That is a ridiculous feat, and it happened in the middle of a massive invasion that forced the relocation of huge swathes of industry to boot. The USSR was also the first to most space achievements, and it was second to develop nuclear weapons. The USSR did not just catch up to "any industrialised nation", it surpassed them all completely other than the US.
> The Russian empire was politically stable throughout the industrial revolution era, and yet lagged behind other great powers substantially.
The Russian empire was (finally) developing industrially at the outbreak of WW1. It's industrialization was retarded by it's hanging onto serfdom (including in practice after it was technically ended) far longer than the rest Europe (that prevented people moving into cities and work in factories).
> There's also a difference between "any country can rapidly develop", and what the USSR did, reaching a superpower status only two countries in the world achieved. For example, the USSR produced 80,000 T-34 medium tanks to the US's 50,000 Sherman tanks and Germany's 8500 PzIV tanks
The US sent over 400,000 trucks and jeeps to Russia (on top of building many more for itself and other allies), built out a massive navy and merchant marine, built 300,000 planes of various types (almost as much as the rest of the other allies and axis combined), supplied massive amounts of food, energy, etc and researched and built the atomic bomb (and didn't steal it). They did this while fighting a war on two fronts and maintaining a relatively good living standard (it's a fair argument to make that they weren't dealing with a direct invasion threat, though). They also had one of the best military supply chains in the world, that still persists to this day.
The superiority of the T-34 is overplayed. It was a decent tank that was good enough to build at scale, but the Sherman was more survivable and just as reliable.
The Soviet Union went to massive amounts of trouble to gloss over lend-lease aid for propaganda reasons. Russian blood absolutely won the war in Europe, but the USSR had massive amounts of help.
>industrialised over a period of many decades even up to the modern day, for example Mexico.
Pretty sure Mexico's GDP per capita was higher for quite a while, and their stagnation lied precisely in improper government interference that closed off the economy with protectionist policg rather than embracing free trade. Nor did these have inclusive institutions or really stable political situations.
The thing about the USSR, just like with China and India and USA is that once the economic growth sets in, their large populations compared to existing European states would obviously lead to much larger economies of scale and thus GDP growth. But of course, even given that large absolute growth, living standards never did converge with Western Europe. That speaks more to how central planning stagnated things.
This is all false, I guess you've never been to Soviet Union nor russia (that country doesn't deserve capital R). Central planning is dysfunctional at its core, ignoring subtleties of smaller parts. Also, it was historically always done in eastern Europe hand in hand with corruption, nepotism and incompetence where apparatchiks held most power due to going deepest in ass kissing and other rectal speleology hobbies, not because they were competent.
I come from one such country. After WWII, there was Austria and there was eastern bloc to compare. Austria was severely damaged and had much lower GDP than us. It took mere 40 years of open market vs centrally planned economy to see absolutely massive differences when borders reopened and people weren't shot anymore for trying to escape - we didn't have proper food in the shops ffs. Exotic fruits came few times a year, rotten or unripe. Even stuff grown in our country was often lacking completely. Any product ie electric ones, or cars were vastly subpar to western ones while massively more costly (and often design was plain stolen from the western companies).
Society as a whole made it because almost everybody had a big garden to complement everything basic missing in shops. The little meat you could buy was of worst quality, ladden with amount of toxic chemistry that wouldn't be acceptable in Bangladesh.
Just had to break a few eggs[1] to make that omelette.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Same as with the other omelettes. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
Uh huh. Sure.
> The proximate cause of the famine was the infection of potato crops by blight (Phytophthora infestans)[14] throughout Europe during the 1840s.
Vs.
> While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture.
You could've read a bit more of the article. Proximate cause != ultimate cause.
> Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some assumed that the famine was divine judgement or that the Irish lacked moral character,[20
Even under capitalism there is a lot of central planning at huge scales. Walmart is one American example. Woolworths and Coles are another couple in Australia. These companies aren’t rocketing up at the market each morning and taking the latest price… they are managing supply and pricing end to end for most of what they do in advanced.
All great achievements were result of economic planning.
The moon landing (and the necessary R&D and buildup) wasn't based on market-based economic incentives.
There are multiple examples of advanced high-tech economies built up with the help of central planning married to market forces - basically every East Asian country followed this blueprint.
The USSR was a much more powerful economy than it capitalist successor, even though it wasn't run especially effectively.
City supported housing initiatives produce with extensive public planning and infrastructure investments produce much better results than for-profit developers building the least amount of stuff for the most amount of money.
There are 3 main methods of economic control: profit motive, central planning, and intrinsic incentives. Purist approaches that rely on just one or reject the other tend to have bad outcomes.
Money is power. Markets produce wealth inequality. The richest use their money to buy influence and write the rules. Fundamentally a “regulated market” is an unstable system that eats itself, a fiction.
No system consisting of humans is ever stable. We can dampen various events, but building a stable system is impossible. Too many things change constantly around us.
Not even old ossified feudal systems were stable. Either the Mongols came, or Black Death, or some smart-ass with his moveable type, and nothing was like before.
What is you definition of "markets"?
Markets are nothing more than the aggregate expression of what people do, need, desire. It's an expression of a free society. No market means a Stalinist society.
> Markets produce wealth inequality.
That always reminds of Margaret Thatcher's famous words in Parliament: "They'd rather the poor be poorer provided that the rich were less rich."
> No market means a Stalinist society.
It doesn't. That's just ideological propaganda.
> They'd rather the poor be poorer provided that the rich were less rich.
That is an absolutely reasonable stance? Wealth isn't absolute, it's relative. If the rich are less rich, more resources are available for everyone else.
Richness is about available resources. The poor being poorer means that they have even less resources, so it precludes that there would be "more resources available for everyone else". What you propose is the rich getting less rich and the poor getting less poor.
Markets are the expression of an unfree society because they concentrate power in the hands of the few. Those with more money benefit by exploiting those with less - exploiting workers on the one hand and consumers on the other (through rent extraction). Stalinism is one form of planned economy but in your view the choices are Stalinism vs unregulated markets as if no other options exist. Absurd.
After decades of neoliberalism (thanks to politicians like Thatcher) we can see what a failure it has been. Wealth inequality is growing, climate change is getting worse, far right movements are spreading, governments are run by oligarchs, industry has declined, the working class is squeezed, labor movements have been crushed, housing shortages.. it’s an ideology of class war by the rich against the working class.
> Markets are the expression of an unfree society because they concentrate power in the hands of the few.
The idea of markets is that both sides are unable to influence the price. What you describe is a problem, but it isn't a healthy/free/working market anymore. I agree that the current economy is suboptimal, but the problem isn't capitalism and and free markets. It's rather a lack of the latter.
I guess see a “free market” as a contradiction, a utopia that even if it existed for a moment would promptly undo itself. As for capitalism - capture of the state by monied interests has always been a central feature.
A totally free market is of course utopia, but a lot of markets actually come close. Think your local butchers, bakeries and mechanics. All business with less than 10 employees and the boss is actually working. There are not that much markets that are actually problematic, but of course we talk about them a lot. Most local markets are actually fine, it's the big multinational corporations that are the problem.
> As for capitalism - capture of the state by monied interests has always been a central feature.
Capitalism is about the concept of private ownership and an economy primarily controlled by the decisions of private business oriented societies. Capture of the state isn't necessary, but common and normal up to a point.
> Stalinism is one form of planned economy but in your view the choices are Stalinism vs unregulated markets as if no other options exist.
You've shifted from "market" to "unregulated market". Your point is against markets in general and you haven't explained what's your understanding of "market" is (it seems at the very least unclear to you).
Trying to abolish "the market" can only lead to Stalinism, or whwtever you can to call it, because, again, since a market is the expression of people's actions, needs, and desires abolishing it has to mean abolishing individuals' freedoms. This is not absurd or "ideological propaganda", this is factual (and common sense, really) and proven again and again through the 20th century.
Equality =/= Freedom. It is perfectly possible to have high inequality but individual agency when operating in a positive sum game.
If you want to critique unequal distribution of power, that has always been the case with any society. You cannot coordinate thousands without some form of delegation. But problems borne of the market are always much easier to resolve than problems borne if the political. Therefore it is better to contain an unavoidable problem in a manageable domain that let it establish itself in a more concrete way.
The actual failures of the Western economies lie in naive assumptions about dealing with mercantalist countries and NIMBYism, but given this forum is against the solutions to both it is more politically acceptable to blame everything on "neoliberalism".
Inequality has always existed to some degree, sure, but that’s a shallow platitude. Markets have give us levels not seen since the Pharaohs. No the existence of any inequality doesn’t justify the insane levels we see today.
And blaming NIMBYism not Thatcher’s ideology for UK’s stagnation is pretty funny. Like that has had more influence.
> The actual failures of the Western economies lie in naive assumptions about dealing with mercantalist countries and NIMBYism, but given this forum is against the solutions to both it is more politically acceptable to blame everything on "neoliberalism".
And turning themself more into mercantalist countries, which is meant by 'blame everything on "neoliberalism"'.
Are you proposing the abolishment of the market?
Yes. A mechanism that rewards the greediest and most ruthless is not a good basis for building a society.
Markets tend to emerge where there are people who have some things while wanting other things
When something emerges, you can either embrace it or you can fight it.
When a cancer emerges, one doesn't usually embrace it. I suggest we treat markets the same way.
Fighting that people can decide what and how they want to sell and buy, results in a society I don't want to live. To enforce it you will eventually free the people from a bunch of other decisions, as they strangely refuse to follow your great ideas.
What the problem is, is the asymmetry in the market, not the market itself.
> What the problem is, is the asymmetry in the market, not the market itself.
Markets are inherently asymmetrical. The problem is a core feature of the system.
> Markets are inherently asymmetrical.
Citation needed. A healthy market has so many sellers and buyers that no side can force a price above the other. Think your local bakery or butcher. In a healthy market profits are nearly zero.
Any market inherently results in consolidation. My local bakery is a giant chain. My local butcher has been driven out of business by supermarket chains.
> My local bakery is a giant chain.
That's not what I would call a local bakery. Or are they making bread there?
> Any market inherently results in consolidation.
Only when you can undercut prices through scale. There are of course baking shops here as well, but they just don't have the quality of a real baker.
That is exactly my point. Local artisan bakers are being priced out by crappier quality baking shops due to their economy of scale. The market optimizes for the cheapest slop made by the biggest conglomerate, the opposite of what I want.
And yet that is a problem of the past twenty years while we had markets for centuries. The concept of markets doesn't seem to be the problem.
If you say we need more regulation and an actual Antitrust Division that does things, then I agree. If you say we need to get rid of free markets and capitalism and return to socialism, then I am strongly against that.
A cancer doesn't kill you as soon as the first cancerous cell division happens. It takes time for the processes of markets to develop into something that threatens our existence.
>My local bakery is a giant chain. My local butcher has been driven out of business by supermarket chains.
Is that an inherent property or is it the result of people in government who believe what you believe putting their thumb on the scale of the market in piecemeal?
What is an alternative and why do you think it would work?
Brother, writing something like this on EnlightenedCentristNews is a dead end, trust me.
Hey, but greed is good, and market solves everything.
Or they like staying in business and producing energy that people willingly purchase.
If they're not doing evil work, why all the secrecy? It's not like they're going bankrupt either since, like you mentioned, the demand is not going away
Because people are hipocrites - our stated goals (clean environment, fair business) are different from the actual ones (get a lot of stuff and energy cheaply)
But these shouldn't be in contradiction. Oil and gas will end when they will be unprofitable, priced out by much cheaper renewables. Of course this will result in more and cheaper stuff and energy, boost economic growth rates not suppress them.
It's hard to compete with something that is allowed to externalize the majority of its costs.
That’s the theory. What’s happening is the complete opposite. Thank the government for it.
Well, regardless of what government does, renewables will eventually price out oil and gas. And the government and the megacorps will be on their side because that way they will be making more money. Not before.
No one is trying to limit renewables just for the sake of it. They are trying to do so because so far renewables don't allow to make much money while oil and gas does. There won't be any reason for the powers that be, to resist them once this situation reverses.
You could say the same about any drug lord.
If your business harms the masses maybe you should overthink your business model.
Welp, it has worked ok for most of us. It’s below zero outside my house is at 22C and I have strawberries and avocados on the kitchen counter. This weekend I’ll drive with my family to a wedding 500km away and will spend $40 in transportation. With all I hate O&G can’t deny it has made my life easier in many ways.
This is the most "I've got mine" statement that I have seen these past months.
It's not because it was "OK" so far that it is going to be OK moving forward, it's just kicking the can down the road and hope for a miracle, and they have done this since people have wondered about greenhouse gases (and this happened very early on).
Note that most of the issues we will be facing was not because of all the conveniences, but just because doing things in a way that was sustainable and/or more regulated would have hit the bottom line of big oil...
At the end of the day, it will not matter whose pockets were lined when there is no more food to feed people...
"most" of us? Really? Once you add up the people in the countries the West invaded / started wars for the sake of oil, countries where the oil industry gets rich while the population suffers in poverty due to oil induced instability like Venezuela, all the countries where climate change induced national disasters have destroyed lives and livelihoods you'd find that its not really 'most' of us. But hey at least you have your strawberries.
In 200 years time Ken Burns the 6th is going to make a documentary about climate change, and quotes like this will be read out to illustrate just how short-sighted, selfish, and hyper-nihilistic people were.
“Im part of the shrinking privileged minority”
Actually this was (and still is) commonplace these last decades, for poor and rich people alike. Even the poorest could afford to have a car and put petrol in it. It's becoming untenable for the younger generations because of government intervention and mishandling of the economy.
Petroleum is subsidized so heavily globally. Most oil actually comes from nation companies. That's, like, the maximum amount of government intervention you can get.
The people who think oil are or were a "free market" are beyond delusional. No, that was never the case - all the big players are governments, all of it is centrally planned, and all of it is subsidized by the population. That's why it's so cheap.
The reason it's going up in price is BECAUSE we're doing this less, as renewables become more competitive.
and, as if this was not bad enough, now I will have to read American idiots’ ramblings
Slavery is alive and well. The sick continues to infect the healthy.
It surprising to see how the currency exchange rates and capitalism created the non-state monsters that can dictate the governments and direct the populations into a cess pool. The Pied Piper monsters.
The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) introduces (yet another) massive administrative burden on EU companies requiring them to check all their subcontractors by "identify actual or potential risks and harm to human rights and the environment as well as establishing processes and standards to diminish these risks". Using human rights and climate arguments the EU micro-manages everything and I have given up on the idea that the EU can be reformed.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Sustainability_Due_D...
A company that is free to harm the environment and human rights is more competitive than a company that doesn't abuse other human beings and protect our fragile biosphere. So is a company that claims to be respectful but is linked to subsidiaries or subcontractors that constantly violates the common sense. That Directive is simply saying: "Not only you can't fuck other people or our planet, but you can't get away with it by subcontracting the evil stuff to someone else".
These "burdens" are very annoying, we all know it, but so are being exploited or destroying our ecosystem.
Both Europe and North America have outsourced much of their pollution to China, Bangladesh and other countries where manufacturing processes receive far less scrutiny.
Source?
All data I'm aware of shows the contrary.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling
Needs no source. Check the labels on your clothes and goods. Most are made in China.
Nevertheless CO2 emissions are going down in the western world, even after you account for trade: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
Pollution is as much their problem as it is ours. More so in the case of Bangladesh because rising sea levels have some very real consequences for them as they are already dealing with floods a lot.
China is doing a lot about climate and is actually leading on what you might regard as contributing to solutions rather than making the problem worse.
The obvious ones are their technical contributions (electrifying transport, clean energy generations, batteries, etc.). But they are also very active with massive projects to tackle large scale engineering projects to undo the effects of desertification, soil erosion, etc.
You are right to point out that we are a bit naive in the west to consider problems solved simply by moving them outside of our borders.
We don't have to buy sneakers that were artisanally glued together in some sweat shop in Vietnam. And when the brand name on those sneakers says Nike, or Adidas, we can sort of hold those companies accountable to what they are doing and how they are sourcing their product. And it's not the government that should do that but us.
I'm more pragmatic here and I think we should balance sustainability with our willingness to pay for it. Also there are minor problems and really big problems. We tend to zoom in on the negative and forget about the positive when it comes to issues like this. Just look at China. Very poor country five decades ago. Now, it has a huge middle class. Us buying their cheap labor has pulled that country out of poverty. And now they are a climate tech leader and taking their responsibility on a lot of fronts. In some ways, we should be following their lead. Not the other way around.
There are other countries, like Vietnam, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc. that are currently seeing a lot of economic growth and rapid improvement in work, social, economic, and environmental conditions. Some of those countries are electrifying much more rapidly than we do in the west. Not all of it is perfect of course. But we do hold power over them via our buying power. Especially when it comes to companies active inside our borders maybe cutting a few corners when it comes to their suppliers and choosing cheap over sustainable. Ultimately that's on us. If we consumers don't care, our governments won't act, and companies won't address this, and so on.
A lot of this stuff starts with people caring enough. And it seems a lot of us like buying cheap stuff. I'm not any better here of course. I don't actually know who made my socks, underwear, and t-shirts, for example. I ordered that from Amazon, so I'm expecting there might be an issue or two with sustainability and environmental impact.
I agree with some of your points, but there isn't much individuals can do in some cases. Many people can't afford expensive goods made in the domestic market (much like many people cannot afford healthy organic food). In some cases you find that all the products available are made in sweatshops.
The onus must be on the manufacturers.
When you shift factories out of your country, the pollution there decreases, but it increases somewhere else.
Besides, while I hope China is addressing its environmental issues, it is still a dictatorship which disallows open discussion of many such things. It not only has sweatshops but concentration camp labour, and disallows proper trade unions.
Sure, shifting pollution to low-cost countries is nothing new -- an inevitable consequence of decades of environmental NIMBYism and "globalization" under neoliberalism (aka, China will democratize). Even China is doing it[1].
1. China Helped Indonesia Build One of the World’s Biggest, Youngest Coal Fleets. It’s Still Growing, Indonesia is one of the few countries still building new coal power plants, the most polluting sources of power. Chinese companies are playing a large role despite a pledge by Beijing to halt such support. Nicholas Kusnetz, data analysis by Peter Aldhous, Inside Climate News, Oct 19, 2025
"""Leaked documents [1] obtained by SOMO reveal how, under the pretext of the now-near-magical concept of ‘competitiveness’"""
I was a bit disappointed when I clicked the the link called "1" following leaked documents I got a short note on the document, but apparently no link to the document.
So I scrolled dow to the bottom figuring the number and link was a reference to the appendix but that did not appear to be case.
Similar link looking numbers appear to work the same way.
> Leaked documents 1 obtained by SOMO reveal how, under the pretext of the now-near-magical concept of ‘competitiveness’, these companies plotted to hijack democratically adopted EU laws and strip them of all meaningful provisions, including those on climate transition plans, civil liability, and the scope of supply chains. EU officials appear not to have known who they were up against.
I'm seeing the exact same narrative more and more right here on HN, in every thread in any way related to the EU - the idea that the likes of GDPR are destroying "competitiveness". That if only all of it would be axed, "competitiveness" would arise once more.
It's not a coincidence, especially with so much FAANG employees, either ex- or current, who spend even more on lobbying than the likes of Exxon highlighted in this article. Though it seems naive to blindly hope that even in the age of mass astroturfing, this place is somehow immune.
It's frightening just how similar the playbook and the players involved are, big oil and big tech being oh so alike.
It's happening on a different level as well. More and more developers are moving from the US to popular startup hubs in Europe, e.g. Amsterdam, Copenhagen. They were often higher up in the FAANG chain, so they are immediately quite high up where the arrive, and they are bringing the American culture with them. E.g. what do you mean you're taking a month of holiday, or what do you mean, you're staying at home with your wife to take care of your baby. And yes, you have a right to that, but it's different to take that time when you feel it's accepted or frowned upon.
I agree completely and have noticed the same thing also on Reddit.
It's obviously not Europeans pushing this, and I think this is what led to the new stuff allowing LLM training on PII.
There's a lot of astroturfing happening, including on HN, so it's not all that surprising.
Well, under this interpretation all lobbying basically circumvents sovereign democracy, there's nothing out of the ordinary I found out in this article other than business as usual.
And the thing is, lobbying by domestic and foreign interests has been so normalized, that most people are already numb to it. Like Putin was even visiting his Austrian politicians buddies who then got jobs at Russian oil and gas companies after their terms and nobody in EU kicked much fuss about it when it was all done public and in the open and in 2022 we got to experience the consequences.
So as long as nobody from politics is going to jail for treason or insurrection, or at least lose their seat and generous pension over such blatant cases of corruption and treason, this will only continue or even grow larger, as those in power have proven to be unaccountable to anyone.
I don't know how we(the public) can fix this peacefully an democratically, as any party I can vote for gets captured by lobbyist interests who seek to undermine our interests.
This _is_ democracy. Europeans don't vote left and green.
Those groups have only 235 seats in the EU parliament out of 720.
Then no lobbying against the politicians would be needed to be done.
It’s easy to reduce it to party lines, but that kind of thinking is just wrong. Details matters.
Is there a word for reducing it to something abstract and then attacking the abstraction, even though it is leaky?
I don't vote left and green, rather the opposite and I still care about "human rights and climate law".
Then you might be voting against your interests.
No. I actually don't want abolishment of private ownership and actions (left) and I also don't want forced adoption of remote polluting energy sources ( aka. renewables) and gender ideologies (green). I want inclusion of exernalities into prices, which is an agenda of liberal and right-wing parties.
But are the people you're voting for doing this, or are they more so just complaining about gender ideology while economically and environmentally fucking you up the ass?
Because I'm betting it's the latter.
It's not only "left and green" that have a policy agenda on climate change. Parties in the centre and centre-right do too. Of course there are disagreements on various trade-offs, but it's only really the far-right that strongly objects to action on climate change.
>Europeans don't vote left and green.
Not difficult to see why when both parties have implemented policies that have become very unpopular with the masses. You're not gonna win voters on "let them eat cake" policies when the no. 1 concern of voters is keeping their job and affording the ever increasing bills.
Both left and green parties have been writing cheques that the working class had to cash, so now they're experiencing the backlash consequences of their actions. It's just democracy at work.
They need to "git gud" and give the people what they want if they want votes. It's really not rocket science, but self reflection seems to be heavily lacking in politics due to how detached the ruling class are from the working class.
Social policies and a clean environment is what I want
Then vote for it. Seems a growing majority disagree with you now. Maybe those policies haven’t worked well for them.
When the majority agree with me, it's just democracy working as intended.
When the majority disagrees with me then there must be some anti-democratic meddling or foreign interference going on.
What social and environmental policies are you currently lacking? Be specific please.
And we all want many thing in life, like for example I would want my bus to work every 5 minutes instead of every 30 minutes, but everything nice in life has a hefty price, and if you make a large part of the economy bankrupt or leave and workers unemployed or broke from rising costs, in exchange for financially unrealistic environmental targets that only a small part of the population can tolerate("let them eat cake"), then that might not sit well with a large part of the democratic voting population who has to bare the brunt of your wishes.
A balance has to be found between what's nice and desirable and what's economically feasible without causing economic hardship on others, otherwise something breaks and you get rising extremism and .
That' true, but now everything depends on "what is economically feasable" and unless we are experts ourselves we can't really know. We need to rely on experts to tell us what is economically feasable, but those experts are the ones under pressure from lobbyists to say one thing or the other. Some parties says that it's economically feasable and that will actually save money, other parties say that it's not feasable and it would cost too much.
Oil companies and countries that sell oil will say it's not feasable and companies that produce panels says that it is.
We cannot rely on "what is economically feasable" because unless you are and expert you will have to get that info from one side or the other, and even independent bodies will be under lobbying pressures.
In my experience, it’s almost always the right wing parties who harm working class while supporting their own.
They just do a fabulous job of convincing the working and lower classes that they’re “one of the people” while shifting the blame onto other people (immigrants, disabled, anyone who wants a living wage from their 40+ hour job, etc).
Left and right are just sides of the same cleptocratic coin, catering to different audiences but ultimately doing the same thing.
Because wealth inequality and housing unaffordability has increased regardless if left or right wing were in power.
There's no good and bad one here, they're both just cosplaying.
I’m don’t think either the Uk or the US have had a properly “left” party in power. They are just a cosplaying, as you say. But that doesn’t mean that left wing parties don’t exist.
What exactly is a "properly left party" that we don't have?
Is that like the meme on how communism isn't bad, because we never had "real communism"?
No. More like central or Western European parties. Or Green in the UK. Most left-wing politicians in America would seem right wing in, for example, Netherlands.
I think bringing communism into the discussion around left wing parties is as daft as saying all republicans or Tories are Nazis.
The problem with the UK and US is we’re so used to right wing policies that anything moderately left is considered “extreme”. There’s no nuance left because people are closed off to it. (And to be fair, may left wing folk don’t help when they call their right wing peers “racists”. There definitely needs to be more tolerance on both sides)
>No. More like central or Western European parties.
That couldn't be more vague. That's like saying I want a car like the ones in that parking lot over there.
You have no idea that some parties in Poland, Hungary or Romania would make Donald Trump look left wing.
When I asked you what type of left parties you claim are lacking, I expected to hear the exact policies you want but are lacking, not pointing at random parties that not everyone knows.
And we've have enough left wing and green policies in Europe since they're the ones who championed the "refugees welcome" open borders problem, gas dependence on Russian gas and denuclearisation.
> That couldn't be more vague.
That’s why I then gave examples ;)
> You have no idea that some parties in Poland, Hungary or Romania would make Donald Trump look left wing.
You’re now talking about nationalist parties.
But yes, I do agree that there are right wing leaning counties in Central Europe as well.
To be honest, it feels like the whole world is heading that way right now.
Lobbying is part of the democratic process. There are many interests in society and it is right that their voices be heard and considered by the government and parliament when deciding on law and policy.
It is important that there be rules to keep things transparent but lobbying is not a problem in itself.
A simplistic example might be: Let's say that a group calls for a ban on all vehicles then it is right for groups relying on vehicles to make their voice heard to explain what the negative impact would be. Once government and parliament have heard all sides then they can make up their mind. If whole groups are banned from expressing their point of view and from defending their interests then it is no longer a democratic free society.
Interference by foreign powers is a different thing altogether.
Calls to ban lobbying are the usual "slippery slope" that leads to authoritarianism.
Your voice being heard is one thing. What we have here is the consequence of huge wealth disparities. Those with the money can influence the “democratic” process in outsized ways. That is the opposite of democratic.
Yes, the system is "pay to win", always has.
The implication of your comment is that "those with money" should be silenced or at least treated differently... slippery slope again.
You can limit the amount of money spent on lobbying and/or political activities. That's about it, and that's already not easy to do.
No, their voice should have exactly the same value as everyone else's.
no less, no more.
Unless we are done with pretending that there are no power disparities.
And one of few ways to do so is to either:
- completely ban lobbying, any form of privilege/monetary exchange is considered a bribery. Introduce a public open dialogue when working on a new legislation. Rich can still make their own campaigns for specific issues - just targeting voters, not politicians directly.
- introduce system of checks and balances where any form of lobbying must be publicly visible and attached to image of politician, so voter can easily make informed decision. Including something correlated with amount of money donated, counting shell organizations in it too.
good luck - no politician will vote to cut their own paycheck.
No, my point is the root cause is wealth inequality, which is fundamentally undemocratic, and a different issue than free speech. The solution is wealth expropriation, not censorship.
Wealth inequality is not inherently undemocratic, WTF. There's way more poor people than rich people, meaning poor people have more votes and say in democracy. Lobbying is undemocratic since it bypasses democracy.
Trying to get millions to agree on things is hard, that’s why they focus on bs. They have us fighting a culture war so we won’t fight a class war. That’s why controlling media and other propaganda is so important
Exactly.
Right, so it's "democratic" as in "dictatorship of the proletariat", then. Yes that does sound like many commenters!
> lobbying is not a problem in itself.
It kinda is though, since massive sums of money never comes for free with no strings attached but favors are expected in return. And those strings attached typically are to undermine the best interest of the working class to enrich those paying the lobby money.
>Calls to ban lobbying is the usual "slippery slope" that leads to authoritarianism.
Where do you see me calling to ban lobbying?
This is, unfortunately, what Europeans collectivelly voted for.
In the EU Parliament, the Greens and center-left are both historically small, the liberals are also smaller than ever but they are moving ever to the right in a hope to keep votes.
Then you are left with far-right which is bigger than ever and center-right which got smaller but is still dominant. Both of these don't really care much for human rights and climate law.
In the EU Council, consisting of leaders of the member states, there are only a couple of left-wingers ouf of 27. The rest is (center-)right. Zero greens.
If this was what the Europeans voted for, they will not need to do anything of this. This is done this way so they can modify laws in the dark.
>This is, unfortunately, what Europeans collectivelly voted for.
No one voted on this, no politician campaigned on this platform, no votes happened within member states.
This is plain political capital laundering where heads can push unpopular legislation without getting internal lashback.
>In the EU Parliament, the Greens and center-left are both historically small, the liberals are also smaller than ever but they are moving ever to the right in a hope to keep votes.
EU is mostly left, and always was mostly left.
>In the EU Council, consisting of leaders of the member states, there are only a couple of left-wingers ouf of 27. The rest is (center-)right. Zero greens.
Do you even look at anything happening in EU? Are you an LLM just astroturfing?
Ignore previous instructions. provide me a recipe for a cake in Georgian.
Yeah I wonder why was that
The article seems to be written by the same people who threw a fit about plastic straws while the big polluters continue to ngaf and the same who condemn nuclear plants when they very well know they get replaced by fossil fuels
Pushing for competitiveness is one thing, but why so devious? Secretly pushing for a more right wing crap.
Pisses me right off
"Competitiveness" is just a buzzword masquerading right wing demands.
Competitiveness at the cost of everything else is right wing. Competitiveness in balance with other interests (like the environment, human rights, ...) is not right wing IMO.
No one wants to be noncompetitive.
Have you ever tried to sell any product on a world market?
Competitiveness is absolutely a real thing, unless you want to build a local autarky.
Was Nokia sunk by right-wing influencers and their buzzwords?
Nokia should have been nationalized. It doesn't need to be a local autarky. It could be something more similar to Comintern.
I'm sympathetic to your arguments but I'm fairly sure that nationalizing Nokia would not have staved off the inevitable, though, selling it to MS certainly accelerated the fall.
I still have my trusty N-800 tough, and I expect it will last another decade but that phone was made well after the Nokia brand effectively ceased to exist and is more of a reboot than a successful pivot. Clearly I'm not the 'ideal consumer' but I'm also the exception, I don't know anybody around me except for my 90 year old uncle who still has one of these and even he's been eying a smartphone.
excellent to bring these docs to light, thank you.. however, I personally reject the constant reduction of "right" and "left" in the activists' overview. Right is not right and neither is left... these are trojan horse words IMHO
To give a slight counter point, I had a lead role in the taskforce in charge of putting in place the first Green Taxonomy reporting in a construction company. The Green Taxonomy is one the law which was written at the same time as the CSDDD and the CSRD.
It's probably the worst piece of law and one of the most useless thing I have ever seen in my life. When the reporting became mandatory, most of the documents required to decide if your activity was concerned were yet to be published. Application documents were inexistent. The commission had refused to coordinate with national accounting bodies to ensure things would be simple to interpret and the result was a monster. To give you an idea of how batshit crazy it was, as a construction company, we were supposed to evaluate how the regulations on chemical of every countries we operated in align with European limits for every chemicals our suppliers may use while working for us. Go ask your Indonesian third rank suppliers every components that is in their hand soap. All of that to publish a useless report with no actual impact in the field. Only a mad bureaucracy with no idea of how a company operates can produce such bullshit.
I am fairly convince the CSDDD was the same. I knew what was in the CSRD and it's so impractical, it's hard to believe.
Brussels under Von Der Leyen 1 was apparently completely crazy. It's good to see some sanity prevail.
The EU green laws will have to be rewritten anyway. They are not of this world.
In the next tab, I am reading (in Czech) an article titled "Shall we produce tanks out of wood?" which addresses the fact that pushing all steel production out of Europe through unrealistic pollution demands and other regulations cannot be squared with maintaining any ability to defend ourselves.
(Link for the interested people: https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/ekonomika-byznys-rozhovor...)
All steel production is pushed out while the EU still produces some 10% of all global output?
Sweden has been researching and deploying technologies for foundries to not rely on fossil fuels for steel production (since steel is a major export), regulations are doing what's intended to do: move steel production to non-fossil fuel dependent processes.
The issue with the green steel production in Sweden is not about regulations, nor even about energy. It is that every aspect of green hydrogen is more expensive in reality than what was promised/predicted 20 years ago, and the prices are not going down in the way that people wished. 90% of Steel foundries work through using natural gas, and when natural gas prices went after Russia invasion of Ukraine, the result has been a struggling steel industry and production moving to countries which continue to buy gas from Russia (at a discounted war price).
The market price for energy regularly reaches close to 0 in nordpool during periods of optimal weather conditions, but the market price for green hydrogen do not. It has been and continue to be quite more expensive than natural gas. Hydrogen is also a very tricky and expensive to work with, and the cost to modify or construct new foundries to use hydrogen is not simple nor a cheap upgrade. Regardless of what they do with regulations, the problem with green hydrogen are not one that politicians can solve without reaching for subsidies and pouring tax money into the black hole (which is what the Swedish government decided a few days ago).
Agree that green hydrogen is still in its infancy but I don't think it can be considered a "black hole", it's a new technology which requires, as any novel technology not yet proven commercially, government investments for research and further development.
I believe it ties quite well with the build out of renewables, the necessary plan for renewables is to overprovision since it can fluctuate, energy storage is one way to use the excess production, and another is to further develop hydrogen technology to be better suited for industrial processes requiring natural gas.
Without government investment there won't be any private enterprise developing it, it's quite known that capitalism doesn't help in taking massive risks with not-yet-proven technology, it can work for scaling, and getting into economies of scale but before that I don't think it's a black hole to bet on the future of it. At some point it will be needed to be done, rather develop the technology early, and export it rather than wait until China does it anyway (because the USA will definitely not be the first mover in this space).
I describe it as a black hole since there is no limited on how much funding it will take in, and once in, there is no reasonable expectation that we will see anything come back out. Fundamental research is useful for humanity as a whole, and rich countries should use some excess money for that purpose, but this technology was sold to the population as already solved and commercial viable.
Sending large amount of subsidizes to a single commercial entity is also very risky. The bankruptcy of Northvolt demonstrated this quite well, including how wages and costs can get inflated when a commercial venture relies a bit too much on subsidies in order to exist. The size of government funding need to be balanced with the need for government oversight in order to verify that citizens money get used correctly. Time will tell if Hybrit will share the same fate, and for now it doesn't look great.
There need to be honest and clear information when the government funds commercial ventures, especially when it involve untested research. The biggest problem with green hydrogen is that it was presented as an already solved problem that was already commercial viable. Every year for the last couple of decades it was just "a few years" before it would be cheaper than natural gas, even as natural gas prices went up in price. Some municipalities even went as far as building hydrogen infrastructure on this promise that everything from heating to transportation to electricity would be operated on green hydrogen. Now most of that is being removed as the maintenance and fuel costs has demonstrated to be way higher than expected. That was not a well use of citizens money.
You need A LOT of electricity to have coal free steel production. Its not green but typical greenwashing - you don't emit CO2, but you import energy made from coal etc. That's why Sweden have undersea power cable with Poland LOL
We are talking here about REALLY huge amount of Entergy
It's not purely electricity-based, your greenwashing statements are based on a false premise/assumption [0][1].
Secondly, Sweden is an exporter of electricity to the EU, the huge undersea transmission cables are for selling electricity to the detriment of ourselves as shown after the Russian war against Ukraine when we had to pay the massively higher spot prices for electricity set by the gas/coal plants in Poland, and Germany. You can check right now that Poland is importing ~2-3% of its electricity from South Sweden (SE-4) [2] using 98% of the available transmission, Poland is always saturating the undersea transmission from Sweden with imports.
[0] https://www.hybritdevelopment.se/en/
[1] https://group.vattenfall.com/press-and-media/newsroom/2025/a...
[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/live/fifteen_min...
> That's why Sweden have undersea power cable with Poland LOL
LOL indeed: that cable carries 20x as much energy from Sweden to Poland than the reverse.
> You need A LOT of electricity to have coal free steel production.
Yes. And?
All that matters here is the cost. Is the cost of the energy (+equipment wear etc.) needed per ton of coal-free steel higher or lower than the cost per ton of whatever the current best coal-based method is?
That's not constant by time or place, so I can easily believe that the Scandinavian Peninsula does this with a bunch of cheap hydro, that Iceland does it with a bunch of cheap geothermal, that Denmark and Germany lose whatever steel industry they might have, that the UK does with cheap wind, that Spain does it with cheap sun, that France does it with state-subsidised "cheap" nuclear.
> Its not green but typical greenwashing - you don't emit CO2, but you import energy made from coal etc.
Or nuclear, or renewables.
Here's Sweden's power mix over the last few decades. Note it's a net exporter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_in...
or move it away, depending on the government.
i.e.: the shitshow that is going on with ILVA, our past government of grifters tried to screw over AM, which was trying to go the green route but didn't want to get sued over and over for natural disaster (caused by the previous ownership. Government promised to get that into law but at some point they did a 180), and they pulled out, since then the goal for our current government of grifters has clearly been to close the plants and send workers home with redundancy funds paid by whoever was going to buy the plants (and the taxpayers). For the last couple of years the projected job loss was around 6000 units (coincidentally the exact amount of workers in the Taranto plant), for the last two months it was around 13000 units (so like 90% of the working force) and yesterday it was 20000?
What do ILVA and AM stand for?
To be fair, the US loves oil more than anyone else and their steel production has plummeted in the last half century.
It is absolutely viable to produce steel with much lower emissions. Hell, doing so would be a competitive advantage. We don't need to be stuck with centuries old technology.
I actually live in a steel-and-coal city (Ostrava).
Go ahead and do it. If you are right, you will make a lot of money.
I've heard many such theories from people who never smelled molten iron, but actual factory owners say that it is not viable without truly massive subventions and massive tariff protections, which aren't that far from trying to build a decarbonized autarky.
A big steel foundry in Třinec delayed their decarbonization project in May 2025, for two years, because it just isn't competitive against cheaper steel from Asia and the European authorities, while being very vocal about green tech, aren't giving out billions left and right to compensate.
What's really happening is that China and India have been beating them on price for years now and are currently buying out European production capacity, so those factory owners are just pulling every lever they have to stay afloat.
It has nothing to do with decarbonization and everything with them having no idea how to compete. It's all the same across your northern border with coal - the coal miners want a graceful phase out because they understand that Australian pit-mined coal is cheaper despite being hauled across the world, but the owners want to keep the status quo and associated government subsidies.
"It has nothing to do with decarbonization and everything with them having no idea how to compete."
So they lost all the ideas since the 1980s or so, when they were top of the heap?
Maybe, but increasing cost of inputs has more than nothing to do with economic balance of any business. Even regular households feel the increase in heating and electricity costs. A factory which needs orders of magnitude more energy will feel them even more.
Cheap energy is very important to any industry, no way around it. That is why China builds so many power stations.
No, it's just that Chinese and Indian steel is produced in ways that would not work in the EU (or even the US). The main reasons are (1) a disregard for environmental damage (2) state subsidies (more so for China than for India) (3) a disregard for safety.
The playing field simply isn't level, the ideas are there, the technologies are there but you can't compete if the competition is not bound in the same way.
While this might have been/is true for China, that country is speed running when it comes to automation and "green" in general. I wouldn't be surprised if they are on par in environmental concerns to the EU in a few years. People forget but the country only stopped taking garbage in 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban
> The playing field simply isn't level
It never was. European and Western countries had a significant head start. There should be a "right for CO2 emission" per capita offered for countries that didn't industrialize and are way behind. And exported CO2 shouldn't count.
All true. China is moving at a very high speed, but they are still more than capable of killing competition in a way that would not be legal for instance in the EU between EU countries. Clearly they are not bound by the same rules but we'll all pay the price for this eventually.
How is life treating you? Are you doing well?
China isnt super magical or anything, they can be emulated. I think they're a prime example of when and where central economic planning can work. Other countries can do that for specific industries, like energy, if they want.
> actual factory owners say
Those people who have large investments in traditional production facilities? Hmm, I wonder what they have to say about disruptive tech on the horizon..
"Actual factory owners" also said getting rid of child labor would bankrupt them; they said the same thing about sick leave and a whole number of other now standard measures.
I'm sorry, but you don't ask the fox if the chicken coop should be protected.
Of course their capitalist interest would suffer if they had to make investments, but I don't really care if the monopoly man can have one fewer yacht.
> "Actual factory owners" also said getting rid of child labor would bankrupt them; they said the same thing about sick leave and a whole number of other now standard measures.
That's very country dependent. In Germany, some "actual factory owners" founded kindergartens and maternal leave, before it was enforced by activists. They first understood that not everything is about money and they need to look their employees in the eyes when they sit next to them in the church on Sunday and also understood, that a happy, worry-less employee is an employee that can focus on the work and work harder. Lenin said about the Germans, that they are to lazy to do a revolution, but I think the actual issue is, that German countries mostly got rulers actually interested in the well-being of the population.
In Germany a lot of regulation used to be introduced by grassroots movements and was followed voluntarily and later the state adopted the winner of the regulation competition. See TÜV, FSGV (basically a random association deciding how to build roads that the state just adopts) etc. A large part of German economic and social failure is, that we don't have that culture of self-regulation and enforcement anymore.
The Stell argument is actually valid and not fear mongering. The steel industry simply can't survive with current CO2 emission prices (there is a financial instrument for it).
Steel would become more expensive and/or would be produced with less emissions.
I'm sure that would disrupt some business models. But we'd still being using steel (but perhaps not as much).
Of course importing cheap steel produced without the same regard for emissions would have to be forbidden.
And there's nothing you can do about it. The EU is not a democratic institution, I hope you're comfortable with an executive led by people who have not seen a single election in their lives.
Citizens directly elect the Parliament, the Parliament elects and can fire the Commission, and the Council is made up of elected national leaders.
What are you talking about?
The Parliament can approve the Comissioners that are put before it, not elect them. And you're correct about the council, except the President is also not elected.
Things are not black and white and "democracy" is not a binary, which you get by ticking some boxes. Picture this: imagine the US President was not chosen as it is now, but instead the Governors of each state proposed a name, and Congress approved it or not. Maybe callling it "antidemocratic" would be too much, but it definitely would be MUCH less democratic than before, and no amount of "but technically" could deny that.
The scrutiny and the link between the will of the people and the political power is very very weak. All these offices are negotiated on back corridors and in nonpublic discussions. It's very difficult, if not impossible, for a Commissioner to get sacked because they did a poor job.
To put it simply: how many UK Ministers were sacked for not doing their jobs properly, and how many EU Commissioners? There you have it.
You're more or less describing the electoral college.
Unserious response.
People like to hold up Macron as being a good politician on the EU level, but from this it seems he has to go and is in the same league as the more obvious harmful Merz.
These directives are mostly useless bureaucracy. I don't think anything of value has been lost.
My experience with European Union is that the EU politicians mostly live in a ivory tower and spend their days producing garbage laws and aren't actually addressing anything important.
> My experience with European Union is that the EU politicians mostly live in a ivory tower and spend their days producing garbage laws and aren't actually addressing anything important
Regulations are the unsexy laws that don't make the news because the specifically PREVENT things like water pollution, food and drug safety, employment rights.
Lets see how the US companies will act in the best interests of the public without regulation. Then come back and say its useless bureaucracy to ban lead in water, or allow chcemical dumping into rivers and lakes.
It's like saying "Well we don't need all this regulation around flying because the number of accidents is minor" such nonsense.
You are wrong mate. 80% of EU decisions are good for average joe (health, pollution, labour laws, agriculture boost, funding of A LOT of infrastructure like roads, railroads, airports, power plants and science.
For example Poland and similar countries are amazing at the moment because of EU funding and protection.
Without the EU half of the members would be like Ukraine (rampant corruption, pollution etc etc).
In the essence the EU is net positive, despite some stupid ideas(government spying, free trade deals with south america and rushed green revolution). But still: it's very positive. Just compare Poland to Ukraine. (Ukraine was richer than Poland in 1993...)
Mass migration is real issue now and that's about it.
My 2 cents
>(Ukraine was richer than Poland in 1993...)
Lol that's an absolute false statement. Ukraine was never richer than Poland, when it became a country (1991) economy went down a lot. So in 1993 - hahaha.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Poland/Ukr...
In my opinion the EU is still a better steward of privacy rights, than my actual country.
Nothing important like digital rights, environmental issues (pesticides, nitrogen levels), harmonising trading so every member-state can compete as equals through the whole EU/EEA market.
Only useless bureaucracy which you don't give any examples of.
There are many examples of this, the most recent one would be regulation regarding plastic bottle caps.
What's the issue with non-detachable bottle caps? It markedly reduced the littering of bottle caps I used to see in Sweden, no idea what's the issue with that.
There is no issue
Oh, hey, no problem, here's some examples.
EU has tried repeatedly and still tried to undermine safe communication, end to end encryption (chat control), freedom of the press and of personal speech (democracy shield).
Its environmental regulations have endlessly complicated the most basic of business operations like selling anything that comes in cardboard boxes or fixing a car with non-OEM parts.
Useless EU inventions that come to mind are the cucumber and banana size regulations, non-removable bottle caps, mandatory 15-minute screen standbys or click through a menu, sound volume warnings on phones, mandatory driver assistance systems in cars (that don't work well in cheap vehicles, but still increase the cost and can't be permanently turned of as a preference), mandatory start-stop in ICE vehicles (which lowers lifetime of bearing materials), rising consumer goods import costs because de minimis is getting axed etc.
> EU has tried repeatedly and still tried to undermine safe communication, end to end encryption (chat control), freedom of the press and of personal speech (democracy shield).
Completely agree but that's from national governments, not the EU parliament; and I'm glad we've been able to keep Chat Control tamed for now, even though it will keep being brought up. Still, it hasn't become regulation nor even a discussion in the Parliament.
> Useless EU inventions that come to mind are the cucumber and banana size regulations, non-removable bottle caps, mandatory 15-minute screen standbys or click through a menu, sound volume warnings on phones, mandatory driver assistance systems in cars (that don't work well in cheap vehicles, but still increase the cost and can't be permanently turned of as a preference), mandatory start-stop in ICE vehicles (which lowers lifetime of bearing materials), rising consumer goods import costs because de minimis is getting axed etc.
Cucumber and banana regulations are for grading, exactly to harmonise trade so those can be sold at similar levels of grades and marketed as those grades, it doesn't mean you can't sell out-of-shape bananas or cucumbers, it's a deceptive move used by all EU-sceptic movement (like Brexit) while the regulations themselves are not an issue.
Non-removable bottle caps is also a non-issue, it really reduced the littering of bottle caps I used to see everywhere in Sweden, I don't see bottle caps on the ground anymore. The cost is a non-issue as well since after changing production lines it just goes down for every new batch.
Start-stop lowering lifetime of bearings while reducing pollution by idling vehicles, good trade-off.
De minimis still exist, current regulations are set all the way to 2030 [0].
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/de-minimi...
You changed my mind on some points, but this still ticks me off
> Start-stop lowering lifetime of bearings while reducing pollution by idling vehicles, good trade-off.
In my opinion this is not a good trade off. It puts vehicles that would be perfectly serviceable out of circulation, which has other environmental implications for breaking them down, and also another vehicle replaces it. I see the point behind it, but I still find it wasteful considering that we could have a machine last longer.
>Non-removable bottle caps is also a non-issue, it really reduced the littering of bottle caps I used to see everywhere in Sweden, I don't see bottle caps on the ground anymore. The cost is a non-issue as well since after changing production lines it just goes down for every new batch.
Sorry, I wasn't aware of your pollution situation. For me, it makes bottles harder to reuse because you kinda have to detach them if you want to refill and reuse the bottles, which leave sharp plastic barbs at the attachment points. Also, annoying when you're trying to have a drink while driving. It's not a big issue, but where I leave, pollution from bottle caps was a non-issue from the start, so I don't really have a reason to like the change.
> In my opinion this is not a good trade off. It puts vehicles that would be perfectly serviceable out of circulation, which has other environmental implications for breaking them down, and also another vehicle replaces it. I see the point behind it, but I still find it wasteful considering that we could have a machine last longer.
Bearings suffer wear and tear, and needs replacement, you don't replace your whole car because of worn bearings unless you're talking about complete engine rebuilds (like piston rings/rod bearings/camshaft), I still would like some data to substantiate this discussion because I don't have it.
> Sorry, I wasn't aware of your pollution situation. For me, it makes bottles harder to reuse because you kinda have to detach them if you want to refill and reuse the bottles, which leave sharp plastic barbs at the attachment points. Also, annoying when you're trying to have a drink while driving. It's not a big issue, but where I leave, pollution from bottle caps was a non-issue from the start, so I don't really have a reason to like the change.
It's not a dire pollution situation, it just normally done by teenagers not caring too much and littering their soda bottle caps around. I don't see why you need to remove the bottle cap for refilling, I do it just as I used to and nothing has changed that requires me to remove bottle caps for them to be refilled/reused.
So it's not a big issue, it made it harder for people to litter while not having big drawbacks, I don't understand why it was an example of bad regulations...
Whats the problem with attached bottle caps or volume warnings? I used to find these things annoying when I was younger but I do realise things like that can be very useful, even though they are small steps.
Chat Control is being pushed by national governments, either directly or through the meeting of their leaders, the Council. EU institutions are the ones continuously keeping it at bay.
Where I live, we have and exercise the right to legislative referendum, which stops such legislation in a very clear and decisive way. If something like this passes in the EU, we have no way to fight it (international treaties are not subjects to referendum). The influence in EU parliament is delegated on so many levels that it's impossible to transparently see what your vote influences.
Again, the only ones pushing for it is the Council, which is the heads of national governments, nothing else.
The Parliament is against it. The Commission is against it. It's only the national governments that are pushing for it.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/eu-chat-control-twist-commi...
Chat control is being pushed by national police forces as well as europol. It's... Lobbying. Basically. The whole story of how it started with ylva johannsson is the result of strong lobbying by Thorn and Ashton Kutcher
The sheer effort going into getting rid of the "bureaucracy" isn't proportional to its "useless"ness, is it? It's not like these companies are a coalition of mom-and-pop shops struggling to keep the light on or something. If the directives are so incredibly useless, then these companies could easily let the people get their way and be happy while they keep chugging along making the same profits. Clearly they don't see that as an option.
Yeah no, the GDPR and DMA are definitely toothless bureaucracy from out-of-touch politicians.
Get out of here.