Archive for category EU

The European Environment Agency published an interesting study a few days ago. It puts a price on the damage caused by air pollution from power stations and industrial plants in the European Union. Most interestingly, the cost of damage is broken down on a facility-by-facility basis.

The worst damages are caused by elderly coal-fired power stations in Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom. However, the top-polluting industrial plant is the ArcelorMittal steel processing plant at Grand-Synthe, Dunkirk, northern France, which will be familiar to anyone who ever drives from Brussels to Calais or Boulogne.

The Grand-Synthe plant caused between €421 million and €595 million in environmental and health damages in 2009, according to the EEA.

Here are some more interesting ArcelorMittal figures:

Net income 2010: $2.9 billion

Profits in 2009 of group company Arcelor Mittal Finance and Services Belgium: €1.3 billion

Tax paid in 2009 by Arcelor Mittal Finance and Services Belgium: €496 (not a typo)

Profits in 2010 of group company Arcelor Mittal Finance and Services Belgium: €1.4 billion

Tax paid in 2010 by Arcelor Mittal Finance and Services Belgium: €0

Value of banked carbon credits given to ArcelorMittal for free under the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS): €1 billion (approximately, depending on the market)

Fine for price fixing imposed by European Commission on ArcelorMittal in 2010: €230.4 million

Reduced amount of fine after Commission admitted “the [ArcelorMittal] subsidiaries could not pay this fine and the parent company would not pay it”: €45.7 million

Personal wealth of ArcelorMittal CEO Lakshmi Mittal (from the Sunday Times Rich List): £17.5 billion (€20.5 billion)

The only reasonable conclusion to draw from this, in respect of the environmental and health damage caused by the Grand-Synthe plant in 2009 is: SEND THEM THE BILL! The ETS has failed disastrously to create an incentive for ArcelorMittal to reduce the environmental damage it does; in fact it has only provided them with a scandalous windfall. A bill for the damage done would provide the direct incentive ArcelorMittal needs.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about energy efficiency, on which the European Commission published proposals yesterday. Take this from a press release from the Eurelectric power generators’ federation: “energy efficiency is key to decarbonising Europe’s economy”. This is clearly wrong. Decarbonisation is mainly a question of the way power is generated. Using less energy might be a good idea for many reasons, not least saving money, but if the way power is generated is not changed, the benefits in terms of reducing emissions and combating climate change will be limited.

I’m with Dieter Helm on this. He is an Oxford University professor and advisor to various governments. His point is that if electricity generation could be 100 percent clean, and if the maximum number of products (cars, etc.) could run on electricity rather than fossil fuels, energy efficiency becomes irrelevant, beyond the eternal quest for lower bills.

Coal is the real key to decarbonising Europe’s – and everybody else’s – economy, according to Helm. Power generating capacity based on coal is increasing, swiftly wiping out any emissions reduction from efficiency savings. Interestingly, the amount of energy from coal globally was more or less steady between 1990 and 2002, but then started to climb, mainly because of installation of capacity in China. The amount of electricity from coal globally went up by 27 percent between 2002 and 2009.

There is surely a risk that emphasising energy efficiency, while broadly a good idea, detracts attention from the steady increase in the use of different emissions-intensive fossil fuels. The European Commission’s energy efficiency proposals will have the effect of making energy companies sell less, in principle reducing their revenues, though I’m sure ways around this will be found. But perhaps the power firms prefer this to being made to massively ramp up investment in the short term and phase out coal.

A big anniversary is looming. No, nothing to do with east Germans streaming through gaps in the Berlin wall. On 17 November 2009 it will be 40 years since the first edition of Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun newspaper rolled off the presses.

The Sun existed before Murdoch took over. It first appeared in 1964, and was a relaunch of the socialist Daily Herald, which in the 1930s was the world’s best-selling newspaper. But Murdoch’s takeover marked a complete change of direction — the ‘Dirty Digger’ turned The Sun into a sensationalist tabloid full of scandal, sex and popular games such as bingo.

However you look at it, Murdoch’s 40-year ownership of The Sun has been an extraordinary business success. In 1969, it was selling about 850,000 daily copies. This soon rose into the millions. In the 1980s, the daily sale was 4 milllion — the biggest circulation in Europe after Germany’s Bild. In the mid-1990s it was up to 4.7 million or so. Even now it sells 3 million, showing great resilience in the face of the Internet onslaught on publishers.

Such huge sales make it influential. The Sun has not been popular in Brussels, being seen as eurosceptic and sometimes downright dishonest in its coverage of EU affairs. Take a look at the Commission’s ‘myths and rumours’ website, which attempts to answer misleading press stories about the EU, and you will see that most of the best stories come from The Sun, from builders being forced to wear t-shirts in hot weather because of cancer fears, to an obligation to hand in sex toys to the authorities because of electronic waste rules. As far as I know, The Sun has no Brussels correspondent for the Commission to take issue with.

The ‘barmy Brussels bureaucrats’ stories can be seen as damaging of course, because The Sun does sell so many copies. But eurocrats can take some comfort in the fact that they are not The Sun’s only targets. From the outset of Murdoch’s reign, the paper has claimed to stand up for the man or woman in the street against unwarranted interference in their business. Before Brussels, The Sun targeted ‘loony leftie’ local councillors in Britain, and then the 1980s/1990s Labour party in general. The Sun even claimed to have won the 1992 general election for the Conservatives with its eve-of-poll headline: ‘If [Neil] Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.’

Right-wing rag

The Currant Bun, as former editor Kelvin Mackenzie called it, is seen as a right-wing rag but in fact its success has left it owing an allegiance to no-one. It switched its backing to Labour under Blair, but is now turning its back on Brown. It is of course owned by an Australian turned American, whose interest in Europe (or anything) is the impact it might have on his bottom line. When Murdoch turned The Sun tabloid he put in place a team that was not part of the then London press establishment. Most of the senior editorial staff were recruited from northern English regional papers with a natural distrust of ‘down south’, or anywhere further afield.

The EU has been a victim of this inbuilt scepticism, as with the famous headline from November 1990: ‘Up yours, Delors… At midday tomorrow Sun readers are urged to tell the French fool where to stuff his ECU’. But is it such a bad thing in the end? The role of the press is to be a check on power, and The Sun, for its many faults, has played its part.

The Sun is also an antidote to power because it expresses its ideas clearly, though in its particular vernacular, whereas those in power use language to disguise their motives. Journalists in Brussels should not forget that the daily ritual of the midday briefing and densely-written Commission statements is an exercise in information control and news management. Sometimes a Sun-style information blunderbuss is needed to blow away the obfuscation.

And it’s nice to see The Sun has not totally lost its knack of turning out classic headlines (‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’, etc.). The recent ‘Barmy Britney’s barnet barney’ (Britney Spears argued with her hairdresser) showed that the subs still have it. Incidentally, The Sun’s take on Berlin, 1989: ‘It’s wall over.’

It’s hard to see, however, what The Sun might look like if it makes it to a fiftieth anniversary. Rupert Murdoch is now nearly 80, while newspaper circulations are falling and their readerships fragmenting. The Sun will survive in some format no doubt, but its glory days are most likely behind it.