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.
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.
> 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'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.
"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.
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.
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 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 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.
Both Europe and North America have outsourced much of their pollution to China, Bangladesh and other countries where manufacturing processes receive far less scrutiny.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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).
Oh, right, the eternal answer for fixing the climate change (and as if the issue with China’s pollution was only CO2 emissions) in HN: “They should have had more babies! That would have fixed their emissions!”
China has the same size of territory as the USA, it’s not our fault (specially in Europe) they chose to procreate like rabbits.
Leave us alone. We need to increase our energy production, not reduce it even further. The rest of the world can reduce it if they think it’s so important.
The EU has much lower CO2 per capita than China. Hence why we're talking about US polluters.
> they chose to procreate
How evil of them. But considering that that's the reality now, it'd be absurd to expect China to have lower total emissions than the USA.
> if they think it's so important
Are you implying that you don't find pollution and climate change important? Do you have no empathy for future generations, or are you in denial about its effects?
Actually I am slightly surprised that the US isn't right at the top (excluding middle eastern countries). It's actually just behind Canada and Australia.
Still kind of mental that your per-capita CO2 emissions are 3x higher than the UK.
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.
Hopefully this will bring back some sort of competitiveness for the EU industry, and hence for EU society as a whole, but I have very big doubts about it. Back to becoming a real-life gigantic tourist park that is, then.
The world is pretty brutal. Evolution depends on death, economy depends on resources extracted from the ground, which is usually an unclean process.
We have at least managed to get the worst pollution out of our cities (nothing like London's Great Smog [0] is happening in the developed world anymore), and we can protect at least some natural parks, but it will realistically take at least a hundred more years of technological development until we can run an economy that does not damage the Earth anymore.
And that will likely mean mining of stuff elsewhere, such as the asteroid belt.
Agreed that the world (the Universe) is quite brutal, and often it requires brutality to just survive.
I will point out though that the companies mentioned in the article don't have humanity's survival as an objective. Only to increase their profit. And that a lot of people see them more like a risk to humanity than an ally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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'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.
"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.
>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.
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.
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?
We can blame both the people who seek to buy power and those who can be bought.
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.
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.
Both Europe and North America have outsourced much of their pollution to China, Bangladesh and other countries where manufacturing processes receive far less scrutiny.
Nevertheless CO2 emissions are going down in the western world, even after you account for trade: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
Source?
All data I'm aware of shows the contrary.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Brother, writing something like this on EnlightenedCentristNews is a dead end, trust me.
What is an alternative and why do you think it would work?
Hey, but greed is good, and market solves everything.
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.
“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.
and, as if this was not bad enough, now I will have to read American idiots’ ramblings
it's a shame that you don't have a EU built website to hole yourself in, but unfortunately you European geniuses can't really build any technology
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?
>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.
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 .
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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?
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.
"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.
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).
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Instead of a re-run of horror utopias, we have actual open horror dystopias now. Yay!
As long as it's not a proprietary horror dystopia.
Unless you are writing from District 9 or Kabul or Caracas, you probably aren't living in an open horror dystopia.
All of which were created by capitalist imperialism, my point exactly.
The hunger games are a dystopia, even if the upper classes live a sweet life. You're just lucky enough to live in the Capitol of global capitalism.
Ascribing fundamentalist Islam in Afghanistan to capitalist imperialism makes as much sense to me as ascribing the Russo-Ukrainian war to Allah.
"You're just lucky enough to live in the Capitol of global capitalism."
This is by far the most fancy description of Ostrava that I have read.
It's not fundamentalist Islam that made US oil interests invade.
> This is by far the most fancy description of Ostrava that I have read.
Well, ask people in Kabul how they feel about Ostrava compared to where they live.
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China has much lower CO2 emissions per capita than the USA. It's just a lot of people.
Oh, right, the eternal answer for fixing the climate change (and as if the issue with China’s pollution was only CO2 emissions) in HN: “They should have had more babies! That would have fixed their emissions!”
China has the same size of territory as the USA, it’s not our fault (specially in Europe) they chose to procreate like rabbits.
Leave us alone. We need to increase our energy production, not reduce it even further. The rest of the world can reduce it if they think it’s so important.
> specially in Europe
The EU has much lower CO2 per capita than China. Hence why we're talking about US polluters.
> they chose to procreate
How evil of them. But considering that that's the reality now, it'd be absurd to expect China to have lower total emissions than the USA.
> if they think it's so important
Are you implying that you don't find pollution and climate change important? Do you have no empathy for future generations, or are you in denial about its effects?
Here's the list: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
Actually I am slightly surprised that the US isn't right at the top (excluding middle eastern countries). It's actually just behind Canada and Australia.
Still kind of mental that your per-capita CO2 emissions are 3x higher than the UK.
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.
Hopefully this will bring back some sort of competitiveness for the EU industry, and hence for EU society as a whole, but I have very big doubts about it. Back to becoming a real-life gigantic tourist park that is, then.
It’s a pretty sad world of being competitive equates to pollution
The world is pretty brutal. Evolution depends on death, economy depends on resources extracted from the ground, which is usually an unclean process.
We have at least managed to get the worst pollution out of our cities (nothing like London's Great Smog [0] is happening in the developed world anymore), and we can protect at least some natural parks, but it will realistically take at least a hundred more years of technological development until we can run an economy that does not damage the Earth anymore.
And that will likely mean mining of stuff elsewhere, such as the asteroid belt.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London
Agreed that the world (the Universe) is quite brutal, and often it requires brutality to just survive.
I will point out though that the companies mentioned in the article don't have humanity's survival as an objective. Only to increase their profit. And that a lot of people see them more like a risk to humanity than an ally.
And, the world is pretty brutal.
> The world is pretty brutal.
Agreed. Issue is we’re at risk of making it more brutal if everyone goes all in on pollution in the name of competition.
> Back to becoming a real-life gigantic tourist park that is, then.
Tourists always welcome.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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
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
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.
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.