Archive

BY KEITH NUTHALL
MEP’s have backed moves to introduce EU pollution controls for ‘non-road mobile machinery,’ such as lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, chain saws and forestry equipment, although the European Parliament’s environment committee has baulked at proposals to grant concessions to large manufacturers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
MEP’s have backed moved to introduce EU pollution controls for ‘non-road mobile machinery,’ such as lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, chain saws and forestry equipment, although the European Parliament’s environment committee has baulked at proposals to grant concessions to large manufacturers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FINAL agreement has been reached in a Council of Ministers-European Parliament conciliation committee on the tightening of a directive on the limitation of emissions of acid pollutants from large combustion plants and new directive fixing national emission ceilings for four atmospheric pollutants, (sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds and ammonia).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission may move one step beyond its existing reputation for being the most enthusiastic industrial regulator on Earth, by developing plans for tabling EU directives to regulate Space.

EU enterprise Commissioner Erkki Liikanen said that regulatory policy should be seen an “essential element” of a European Strategy for Space, being developed by the Commission and the European Space Agency.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
EUROPE’S clothing industry is “too big to be squeezed into niche markets,” says a report produced by experts on the sector at the European Commission. EU clothing manufacturers “need a sufficiently broad economic base to generate the turnover and economies of scale necessary to finance research and innovation,” says the report which is not binding on the Commission but will form the basis of future actions by Brussels in the sector.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission and European Court of Justice are shaping up for a conflict over the rights of national governments to hold golden shares in privatised utilities that given them special rights to intervene in shaping their policies, even when they do not own them.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EURELECTRIC has welcomed the publication of guidelines from the European Commission that encourage local and national public authorities to use EU legislation on public procurement to promote the purchase of environmentally friendly goods and services.

Importantly, said Lars Peter Svane, the federation’s head of market regulation, the Commission’s “interpretive communication” does not advise local and national governments to adapt procurement practices so that environmental good practice automatically becomes a sales condition.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has finally given EU Member States the green light to help their electricity producers meet expensive ‘stranded costs’ that were incurred before the power market was liberalised in the late 1990’s, although Eurelectric has attacked Brussels for acting too slowly.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has run out of patience with France and Belgium over their flouting of the EU Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive and has decided to launch legal cases against the two countries at the European Court of Justice.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A MAJOR European Union research study has concluded that the ‘true’ price of using coal and oil to generate electricity is double that usually assumed by standard accounting systems, when the costs of cleaning up the resulting pollution and dealing with the resulting health problems are taken into account.…