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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Sustainability_Due_D...
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.
All data I'm aware of shows the contrary.
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.
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.
Pisses me right off
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...)
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.
Be wary of any politician that does not have the mob of the people on their side.
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.
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
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... .
Those groups have only 235 seats in the EU parliament out of 720.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
(evil spirit however is a real thing).
So you're not wrong.
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.
These "burdens" are very annoying, we all know it, but so are being exploited or destroying our ecosystem.
It's obviously not Europeans pushing this, and I think this is what led to the new stuff allowing LLM training on PII.
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.
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...
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?
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?
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.
No one wants to be noncompetitive.
Competitiveness is absolutely a real thing, unless you want to build a local autarky.
Was Nokia sunk by right-wing influencers and their buzzwords?
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).
We are talking here about REALLY huge amount of Entergy
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...
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?
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.
Cartoon villains are that way for absurdist comedy purposes, they weren't supposed to reflect reality.
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.
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.
Get out of here.
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.
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.
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.
Not all of the parties do object to that, so, no, not all lobbying is corruption. Writing to your representative is lobbying.
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.
Yet another thing on my reading list, I guess.
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).
When people demonize "Big Oil" they don't mean the product. They mean how the people who run it behave.
The dependence on oil is physically plausible, the constant political or public subversion is not.
The market does work, but it’s a giant paper clip AI and needs regulation in order to not turn everything into paper clips.
If your business harms the masses maybe you should overthink your business model.
What are you talking about?
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
Only useless bureaucracy which you don't give any examples of.
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.
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...
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
LOL indeed: that cable carries 20x as much energy from Sweden to Poland than the reverse.
Those people who have large investments in traditional production facilities? Hmm, I wonder what they have to say about disruptive tech on the horizon..
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...
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...
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.
There is nothing special about central planning in that manner that a laissez-faire economy would also achieve at that low development.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
North Korea is sending things into space. You can't measure a country on its isolated accomplishments, even if they're impressive.
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.
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.
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."
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 .
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.
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.
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.
When the majority disagrees with me then there must be some anti-democratic meddling or foreign interference going on.
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.
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.
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...
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
When a cancer emerges, one doesn't usually embrace it. I suggest we treat markets the same way.
> 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
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.
One might even say that given the EU's history as an organization, this has always been the intent of creating it in the first place, not an accident.
Is that like the meme on how communism isn't bad, because we never had "real communism"?
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
What the problem is, is the asymmetry in the market, not the market itself.
Because I'm betting it's the latter.
And blaming NIMBYism not Thatcher’s ideology for UK’s stagnation is pretty funny. Like that has had more influence.
And turning themself more into mercantalist countries, which is meant by 'blame everything on "neoliberalism"'.
Markets are inherently asymmetrical. The problem is a core feature of the system.
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)
How is life treating you? Are you doing well?
> 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.
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.
Markets exploit. Example: the labor market; individuals are forced among unfavorable options to work for the enrichment of business owners otherwise they will end up on the street. Business owners themselves do not face this choice; they have their capital to fall back on. Another example is the housing market where the wealthy have bid up housing as a financial asset, so the working class pays a larger and larger share of income to banks and rentiers, a cash flow from workers to the wealthy. Now people are making ‘choices’ here so supposedly that means markets are expression of free desires. But when one’s choices are constrained due to the power differential between the haves and have nots, the choices are not a free choice. To have actual agency you have to have power, but the power is in the hands of the ownership class.
Maybe you think markets are a necessary evil. But they are not some bastion of freedom like you suppose. That is absurd. We should look at markets for what they are not to candy coat them.
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’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.
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?
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.
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.
That work can be exchanged for money predates (the current form of) capitalism and depends fundamentally only on the concept of money alone. I fail to see how that is exploitation per se. You choose to trade something you have for something you want. That's freedom. Taking that away means slavery or starving people.
> The state maintains this exploitation of workers’ productivity through so-called property rights - the “rights” of the business owner over the worker.
What are you talking about? What "rights" of a business owner? The only thing they make are voluntary contracts. You are doing the same when you buy groceries, you are trading money you have for the work of others. What you describe is (wage) slavery, which we claim to have abolished.
Yes they are property rights, but show me the person who doesn't have property. I bet even the homeless person doesn't want it to be legal that the few processions he has can be taken away by anybody, because they just want it.
In civilized countries employees also have more rights than employers e.g. for notice periods, precisely because the working market is often in a state where the employee has less negotiation power. The contract drafter is also the disfavoured party in court.
Nor are people all “free” under capitalism - for example the ability to start a business is predicated on assets to fund the business. Capitalist freedoms is freedom for the rich.
And the supposed freedoms of a worker to enter into a contract are a choice between lesser evils - limited choices given their precarious position relative to employers. Jeff Bezos vs an Amazon warehouse worker - it’s not a contract between equals. You seem intent on denying the real power difference between employers and employees as supposedly free arrangements.
As for worker rights they have been fought for by the labor despite the vicious resistance of the capitalist class. Since the 1980s those rights have deteriorated as wealth has continued to consolidate. It’s a trend that’s likely to continue as the richest pollute our globe, promote austerity, extract rent from the working class, undermine democracies, and instigate war.
Can you please define what you mean with "property rights of capitalists"? I don't think we are thinking of the same. When I think of property rights, I think of the concept of exclusive ownership of a thing, which is maintained by declaring theft to be illegal. That is a right, that everyone has including the homeless person living next to the train station.
> Nor are people all “free” under capitalism - for example the ability to start a business is predicated on assets to fund the business. Capitalist freedoms is freedom for the rich.
You can start selling parsley growing in your living room tomorrow, from seeds you found in the local park. However we didn't just started being settled yesterday, so you do need to compete with all the other people already doing things. That you need resources to live, that you don't just have, is not something, that was invented by the "evil capitalists", that is something, that is just human nature (actually not specific to humans). It is true, that some people are born rich, and most don't, but this is unfair not unfree.
> And the supposed freedoms of a worker to enter into a contract are a choice between lesser evils - limited choices given their precarious position relative to employers. Jeff Bezos vs an Amazon warehouse worker - it’s not a contract between equals.
Yes, people like Jeff Bezos are an issue, and Amazon is famous for being a shitty company. However most employers are not Jeff Bezos and most employees don't work for Amazon. You could also start working at the carpenter next door and if you are very good, you will inherit the company. They are looking for people like crazy, prizes for them are high and a lot of craftsmen need to close their business, not because of less demand, but because they are old and their is no one to inherit them to. Working at a carpenter requires you to have finished school, which is payed for by the state and actually mandatory.
> You seem intent on denying the real power difference between employers and employees as supposedly free arrangements.
> In civilized countries employees also have more rights than employers e.g. for notice periods, precisely because the working market is often in a state where the employee has less negotiation power. The contract drafter is also the disfavoured party in court.
Yes, once you are in a contract you need to fulfill them, however you can make any contract you like and are free to terminate them at any time (with a notice period).
> As for worker rights they have been fought for by the labor despite the vicious resistance of the capitalist class.
That highly depends on the country. Often also rulers have seen that peace in their society makes for a stronger society and employers that employees that don't need to think about feeding their children produce better work and providing benefits to their employees improves there competitiveness in the workers market. Traditionally states also didn't liked persons becoming richer than them, as this might pose a threat, people like Jeff Bezos are very much a new phenomena.
