A lot of the arguments going back and forth seemed to involve the selective quoting of numbers, but one point made by the Commission did seem highly relevant: if Commission officials are paid so well, why are there not more applications for plum EU jobs from countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom, where civil servants are also relatively well-paid?

The chart below helps to put this into context. The left column for each country (blue) shows that country’s share of the EU’s overall population. The middle column (red) shows that country’s nationals as a percentage of the applicants invited for assessment for a Commission job. The red column shows this percentage for 2010-12. The right column (yellow) shows the same thing but for 2012 only.

The chart shows some interesting differences between countries. It is a limited snapshot and there could be many explanations, of course. For example, eurosceptic countries, such as the Czech Republic and the UK, seem to supply relatively few applicants for EU jobs compared to their share of EU population. Belgium is over-represented in terms of applicants, but that is no surprise considering the EU presence in Belgium.

Particularly striking is that Italy and Spain are massively over-represented in terms of EU job applicants. So is Portugal. The obvious conclusion is that talented young people from the crisis-hit countries are getting out if they can, and the exodus seems to be speeding up, with a higher proportion of applications in 2012 then in 2010-12 overall. But Greece has 2.25% of the EU population, yet only supplied 2.22% of applicants invited for assessment in 2012. Ireland is also under-represented: 0.89% of the population, 0.74% of invited applicants in 2012.

Eastern European countries tend to be over-represented: Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and Slovakia.  But Poland, strikingly, is not. It has 7.6% of the EU population but provided only 3.2% of applicants invited for assessment in 2012.

Western and northern European countries, meanwhile, tend to be under-represented: Germany, Denmark, France and the United Kingdom. But Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden are somewhat over-represented.

The most under-represented country (excluding Cyprus, Malta and Luxembourg, from where no applicants were invited for assessment in 2012) is the United Kingdom. As David Cameron and George Osborne have been working their magic and putting a cloud over future UK EU membership, there is no reason to think the number of UK applicants will rise in the next few years. After the UK, the most under-represented countries are Denmark and, perhaps surprisingly, France. The most over-represented are Belgium, Bulgaria and Portugal.

Of course, today’s applicants for Commission administrator posts are tomorrow’s top officials and heads of unit, so give it ten to 15 years and the EU, if still around, will be largely run by southern and eastern Europeans, with Italians and Spaniards especially prevalent. Extrapolating massively from the 2012 number for applicants called for assessment, the day could arrive when 45 percent of EU officials come from just three countries: Belgium, Italy and Spain.

Just before the summer holidays, the Commission quietly decided to appeal an EU Court of Justice ruling that found that the Commission was wrong to deny citizens and citizens’ groups the right to ask for a review of its decisions on environmental issues. These rights are enshrined in an international treaty, the Aarhus Convention, which the European Union ratified in 2005, but then wrongly implemented, according to the court.

Under the Commission’s interpretation of the Convention, organisations that are directly affected by its environmental decisions can ask for a review, but those that are indirectly affected cannot. Usually this means that, for example, if the Commission decides not to approve a pesticide, the company that makes the pesticide can question the decision. But if an environmentally dubious pesticide does get the Commission’s rubber-stamp, individuals or environmental groups cannot request a review.

The court rulings related specifically to pesticides in food and air quality standards. Environmental lawyers ClientEarth said the Commission’s appeal was “pure hypocrisy” and “antidemocratic”. Even the Commission’s environmental directorate-general believes the appeal will be lost and the exercise will be a drawn-out waste of taxpayers’ money.

But others within the Commission have never let such considerations bother them before, and are not about to start now. In mid July, the Commission said 2013 will be the “European Year of Citizens”, but presumably only if they are seen and not heard. The EU Council, which represents member state governments, is also joining the appeal. Shamefully, so is the supposed bastion of EU democracy, the European Parliament.

ClientEarth has now said it has “officially requested the European Commission drop its appeal”. Did they ask DG Environment or DG Enterprise? We wait to see if the Commission has a change of heart – in favour of the all-important citizens.

[This is a brief update to an article published at http://www.euro-correspondent.com/eu-insider/news-and-comment/seen-but-not-heard/]

Note: this article was modifed on 5 September 2012 to clarify that ClientEarth was not one of the parties that complained to the EU Court of Justice about Commission decisions relating to pesticides in food and air quality.

Weather should not be confused with climate (at least that is the correct response to climate change deniers, who like to say that cold weather “disproves” global warming). But can the current weather extremes be directly attributed to global warming? The official and scientific response is that they cannot, but changes in the climatic pattern can (that’s why they call it climate change). EU Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, speaking at a European Policy Centre event (10 July) said that “it’s important that we do not mix weather and climate,” but added that “I can see [climate] developments that support that something is changing,” with heavy precipitation, floods and grey summers in northern Europe becoming the new normal, in line with climate scientists’ predictions.

It is unfortunate that the link between global warming and weather cannot be made, or that no-one wants to make it. It would be much easier to quantify the damages from climate change if particular weather events could be attributed to global warming.

For example, the November 2009 floods in Cumbria, northern England, caused by unprecedented heavy rainfall, resulted in insurance payouts of about £175 million (€220 million). Damages from current and recent flooding in the UK will be of a similar magnitude. The most expensive insured event in Europe in 2011, according to the Swiss Re sigma study, was flash flooding in Copenhagen in July, which caused damages of $0.8 billion (€0.65 billion). But though such events are becoming more frequent and more intense, and though intuitively they seem to be a consequence of climate change, we have to hold back from saying that they are.

Quantified and attributed damages assessed on a regular basis would focus attention, possibly even in Poland, on the need for governments to do much more in the face of climate change. We are only at the beginning of a process of climate change, caused, so far, by a relatively limited temperature rise. May 2012 was the warmest May on record, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with an average global surface temperature of 0.66°C above the twentieth century average. If, as seems likely under the current little- or no-action scenario, the global temperature rises by 3 or 4 degrees by the end of the century, events such as the July 2011 Copenhagen floods will happen much more frequently, and the economic costs will rapidly mount.

*** STOP PRESS ***

Just as Commissioner Hedegaard was saying that specific weather events cannot be attributed to climate change, scientists were saying they can. The UK Met Office published research (10 July) that “for the first time… includes so-called ‘climate attribution studies’, looking at six key weather events shortly after they have happened”. For example, global warming means that “the extreme warm average temperature in November 2011 is 60 times more likely to have occurred than in the 1960s,” though not all weird weather can be similarly attributed to climate change, the scientists said.

It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that competition and trade commissioners are invited because managing transatlantic competition and trade are part of the agenda. The organisers themselves say it is all about “off-the-record discussion about topics of current concern especially in the fields of foreign affairs and the international economy”. This year, as in previous years, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt was also there, along with the various commissioners. The Commission is carrying out an investigation into Google, accusing it of anti-competitive practices. Prior to Bilderberg, Almunia said that Google has “repeatedly expressed to me its willingness to discuss any concerns that the Commission might have”. Did Almunia and Schmidt have such a discussion at Bilderberg?

At first the Commission denied knowledge of the conference, before defaulting to the line that no information had been issued by the organisers and therefore there was nothing to say. A Commission spokeswoman did concede that “the purpose of the [Bilderberg] conference is to meet people and talk about everything”. So had that included the Google antitrust case? “We have no comment on that,” came the reply.

[Based on an article published in Private Eye].

I did some work on this issue last year for Corporate Europe Observatory. Here’s the gist:

The European Union’s research and development grant scheme, the Seventh Framework Programme, commits €2.83 billion (5.6 percent of the total budget) to space and security research between 2007-2013. Much of this money is being spent on surveillance or even pseudo-military projects, though spending of EU research funds on weapons R&D is forbidden.

One of the most obvious pseudo-military projects, according to Ben Hayes of think tank the Transnational Institute, is TALOS (Transportable autonomous patrol for land border surveillance). TALOS is a Polish-led project to develop unmanned drones that can be used for border control. Among the project’s deliverables are military-style land vehicles (similar to small tanks), which could be adapted to carry weapons. Demonstration videos showing how drones and “interceptors” can be used to catch illegal immigrants (with the accompaniment of pumping rock music) are available at http://talos-border.eu/

EU funding for TALOS is €12.9 million. Like all EU-backed research projects, the consortium behind TALOS will retain the intellectual property, potentially creating a valuable asset that will boost corporate profits when sold on to governments around the world.

Among the TALOS partners is defence firm Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI)*, which has already developed a range of drones, some of which have been used for “assassination missions” over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. IAI is also a partner in the EU-funded OPARUS project (public funding: €1.19 million), which is working on an “open architecture for the operation of unmanned air-to-ground wide area land and sea border surveillance platforms in Europe”. Other OPARUS partners include BAE Systems, Dassault, EADS and Thales, large defence contractors which already benefit from participation in multiple strands of the Framework Programme, such as the Clean Sky Joint Technology Initiative.

Israeli companies are particularly successful in securing EU research grants. Israel participates equally in FP7 alongside EU countries and is one of a group of countries (the others being Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland) that, after France, Germany and the United Kingdom, secure proportionally the most funding. In addition to OPARUS and TALOS, IAI is involved in another 15 projects, attracting total public funding of €148.55 million.

Another prominent Israeli defence company benefiting from EU research funds is Elbit Systems. Elbit is a partner in four FP7 projects, funded by the taxpayer to the tune of €27.3 million. Among these projects is TASS – Total Airport Security System – which is developing a airport surveillance system and will be tested during the London Olympics in 2012 (see here).

Elbit has been labelled a company that helps consolidate Israeli control over the occupied territories. It provides surveillance technologies to the separation wall around the West Bank. The EU considers the wall illegal where it is built on Palestinian land.

Ben Hayes says that the EU suffers from a kind of myopia when financing security research. The advisory group overseeing the security part of FP7 is dominated by homeland security officials and defence companies that benefit directly from EU security research funds. The group includes representatives from Cassidian (an EADS company), Finmeccanica, Sagem/Morpho (now merged into Safran), and industry group the European Organisation for Security (the membership of which includes Cassidian and Safran). There is a “structural conflict of interest: the same companies setting the research agenda and then applying for the money on offer,” says Hayes.

The European Commission, he adds, is “using the security research money to support policy development,” resulting, in effect, in another lobbying avenue for major defence and security companies. The aim is also to support EU defence companies in the face of Chinese or Russian competition. “It’s starting to look like procurement,” Hayes says. “It’s openly about industrial subsidies”.

*IAI’s first half 2011 sales to the “military market” made up 72 percent of total sales.

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.

The first was the finding of the Opera project, at Gran Sasso near L’Aquila, that Einstein might have got it wrong. The discovery that tiny particles could apparently travel faster than the speed of light earned headlines worldwide, followed by a faster-than-the-speed-of-light debunking (see for example the Wall Street Journal). In fact the scientists who published the finding urged caution and asked others to test their work. So we shall see.

The second report was published by the European Commission Joint Research Centre’s Institute for Environment and Sustainability in Ispra, northern Italy. The institute’s data shows that world greenhouse gas emissions from manmade sources reached an all-time high of 33 billion tonnes in 2010.

There are several sobering aspects to this data. First, it shows that the Kyoto Protocol has not worked. Annex I countries (those with emission reduction targets) are likely in fact to collectively meet their target but only because of two historical accidents: the collapse of Soviet-bloc heavy industry, and the continuing financial and economic crisis, which led to major industrial production drops. Had these interruptions not happened, developed world emissions would be much higher.

The report also shows that any Kyoto Protocol related achievements have been rendered largely irrelevant by growth in emissions in non-Annex I countries, especially China. Chinese emissions have doubled since 2003, and in absolute terms are now well in excess of even US emissions. Chinese per capita emissions now exceed those of France and Spain (France is a low-carbon country due to nuclear power), and are on the same level as Italy. Alarmingly, the Chinese could be emitting on a per capita basis at the same high level as Americans by 2017 if current trends continue.

The enormous Chinese emissions growth is largely a consequence of installation of fossil fuel based energy generation, mainly from coal. Depending on who’s figures you look at (Chinese official statistics are treated with caution), in one year alone, between 2009-2010, Chinese coal consumption increased by between 5.9 and 10.1 percent. The building of dozens of coal-fired power plants in China locks in emissions for the next few decades and makes it unrealistic that global emissions will peak in 2015, as recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is especially the case because emissions in developed countries are not dramatically declining to compensate for the developing country increases.

The third – largely ignored – finding from Italy last week came from the Italian Glaciological Committee. It found that Italian glaciers have lost 37 percent of their volume in the last quarter of a century, with a speeding-up of the shrinkage since 2003. Italy’s glaciers could be gone completely by 2050, and the process is now likely to be irreversible, the scientists said.

This is a real-world illustration of the pace of global warming, the consequences of which are unpredictable, but which will involve loss of ice cover, rising sea levels, and chaotic weather patterns. The number of weather-related natural disasters is already increasing sharply, affecting more people (see CRED EM-DAT), and becoming more expensive, as the insurance industry well knows.

Unfortunately policy makers are ill-equipped to address the problem, even though they’ve been told enough times what the problem is. The inertia might be down to denial, the cumbersome structure of decision making, short-term thinking or inability to communicate the risks, but the result is the same: too little action, too late. But perhaps the scientists at Gran Sasso will really prove Einstein wrong, and we can send José Manuel Barroso back in time to sort it all out.

The Olympics will provide a live test for a “Total Airport Security System” (TASS), backed with an £8 million EU grant from research spending. The project promoters give little detail, but say that different scenarios will be tested at Heathrow, involving “integrating and fusing different types of selected real-time sensors and sub-systems for data collection in a variety of modes”.

The TASS consortium includes Britain’s airport operator BAA, which is obviously in need of an EU hand out, having made a £200 million loss last year. But the lead roles are being taken by firms from Israel, not an EU country at last checking. VERINT Systems (Israel) will coordinate, while surveillance know-how will be provided by Elbit Security Systems. Elbit’s supply of Big Brother cameras to the West Bank wall have led to it being dropped as an investment by some pension funds, and the Commission itself considers the separation barrier illegal where it is built on Palestinian land. It is worth noting that intellectual property created in the course of EU research projects (eg new surveillance systems) remains the property of the firms involved, so in theory EU money could pay for development of systems that will ultimately be planted atop an illegal wall and used to keep an eye on the Palestinians!

Considering that the TASS project will result in a high-tech system that can profitably marketed to airports around the world, it is unclear why the Commission needs to dole out this corporate welfare. Defence giant BAE Systems is also taking part, being clearly unable to fund research and development from its £1 billion 2010 profit. BAE is separately involved in 12 similar EU research projects, funded with another £71 million in taxpayers’ cash.

The TASS project website is here: http://www.tass-project.eu/

A version of this article was published in Private Eye magazine.

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.

Current commissioners Joaquín Almunia and Neelie Kroes also attended, just as they did in 2010. Kroes was at Bilderberg in 2009 as well. It is interesting to note that one of the topics for discussion this year was ‘social networks: connectivity and security issues’. This will have been of particular interest to Kroes, in her role of Digital Agenda Commissioner. It would also have sparked the interest of attendees Chris Hughes (Facebook co-founder), and Eric Schmidt and Reid Hoffman, respectively the executive chairmen of Google and LinkedIn. But any discussion that might have taken place between the CEOs and Kroes no doubt did not touch on her regulatory role.

Meanwhile, Almunia was able to rub shoulders with the top executives from a number of major companies, including Airbus, Shell, Siemens and so on. Unquestionably, Almunia’s impartiality as competition commissioner was in no way dented by any discussions he may or may not have had with these industry leviathans.

One CEO in attendance was Klaus Kleinfeld of Alcoa. In March, the Commission took the Italian government to the EU Court of Justice because it had not done enough to recover illegal state aid given to Alcoa. Alcoa is currently appealing the Commission’s original decision to charge the Italians with reclaiming the aid.

I’m sure that Almunia and Kleinfeld, should they have met at the conference — possibly in the company of Italian economy and finance minister Giulio Tremonti, who was also there — politely steered away from any discussion of this matter.

What is it though with competition commissioners and Bilderberg? The current and previous two holders of that post — Almunia, Kroes and Monti — were all at St. Moritz.