The European Commission has proposed giving itself legally-enshrined power to plan the expansion of European electricity grids, as it scrambles to update an ageing network to meet the soaring demands of the clean energy transition. The proposed changes to the Trans-European Networks for Energy, or TEN-E, regulation, would give the Commission power to conduct “central scenario” planning to assess what upgrades are needed to the grid — a marked change from the current decentralized system of grid planning. The Commission would conduct this planning every four years. Where no projects are planned, the Commission would have power to intervene. The proposal was part of the European Grids Package, a sweeping set of changes to EU energy laws released Wednesday. Electrification of everything from transport and heating to industrial processes is essential as Europe moves away from planet-warming fossil fuels. But that puts huge strain on networks, and the Commission estimates electricity demand will double by 2040. An efficient, pan-European electricity grid is essential to meeting this demand. “The European Grids Package is more than just a policy,” said Teresa Ribera, the EU’s decarbonization chief, in a statement Tuesday. “It’s our commitment for an inclusive future, where every part of Europe reaps the benefits of the energy revolution: cheaper clean energy, reduced dependence on imported fossil fuels, secure supply and protection against price shocks.” Along with centralized planning, the Grids Package proposes speeding up permitting of grids and other energy projects to get the infrastructure faster, including relaxing environmental planning rules for grids. Currently planning and building new grid infrastructure takes around 10 years. It would do this by amending four laws: the TEN-E regulation, the Renewable Energy Directive, the Energy Markets Directive, and the Gas Market Directive. The package also proposes “cost-sharing” funding models to ensure those countries that benefit from projects contribute to its financing, and speeding up a number of key energy interconnection projects across Europe.

President Donald Trump has changed his position on more than a few things over the years, but in at least one area he’s been consistent: tariffs. The president is a tariff man, as he’s fond of saying. And the man behind the man in this instance is U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. A longtime trade lawyer who served in the first Trump administration, Greer is now working to help revamp the global trading system at the president’s behest — and he rejects the widespread criticism that Trump’s sweeping tariff regime has been rolled out haphazardly. “Yes, there’s a strategy,” Greer said in a new interview with The Conversation. “First of all, you don’t change 70 years of trade policy overnight. And second of all, when some people say, ‘Oh, well, this is chaos. What’s your strategy?’, what they really want to know is can we go back to how it was before? And that’s not going to happen.” Much of the president’s tariff agenda is currently at risk amid a seemingly skeptical Supreme Court, though Greer professed confidence and said the White House had backup options if need be. Perhaps most worrisome for the administration is the politics of higher prices, and Greer was eager to bat down charges that tariffs were to blame. “People are worried about housing, they’re worried about healthcare — things we don’t import,” he said. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You have probably the most important portfolio of this administration given just how big of a priority trade has been for the president. I was at many a Trump rally when he talked about how “tariff” is his favorite word, now his fifth favorite word, “God, love, wife,” something else. Yeah, he had to moderate a little bit on that. You are a veteran trade lawyer. You served in Trump’s first term as chief of staff to then-U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. What is different about the approach this time around? In the first Trump administration, we were charting new waters, right? We were coming into the so-called Washington consensus that tariffs were bad and we shouldn’t protect domestic industry and we shouldn’t try to make tough deals with our friends and foe alike. Now having laid the groundwork in the first term, showing we could use tariffs effectively while having a booming economy, the president was able to move to his true vision, which he’s had for many years, which is to protect the American economy with tariffs, use them as leverage where needed to get foreign market access, and otherwise use them for geopolitical issues. So where we were walking in the first term, now we can run and fly, frankly. One of the narratives around the tariffs is that the strategy is chaos, that this has been really unpredictable. I’ve heard from businesses that it’s been a challenge because they’re just not sure where all of this is going to land, plus you have all of the legal cases on top of that. So is the strategy chaos? Is there a strategy? So yes, there’s a strategy. First of all, you don’t change 70 years of trade policy overnight. And second of all, when some people say, “Oh, well, this is chaos. What’s your strategy?”, what they really want to know is can we go back to how it was before? And that’s not going to happen. A lot of people focus on April 2 Liberation Day. We announced potentially very, very high tariffs. But I would focus people more on Aug. 1, and I use that date because that is the date where the president really set the tariff rates, and where we announced a bunch of deals. And from there, the structure that has played out demonstrates the strategy that we have. If you look at the tariff setup in the world that’s come out of the president’s program, the highest tariffs are on China. Again, not because we bear China any ill will, but because we have a giant trade deficit with them and they have a lot of unfair trading practices. The next set of highest tariffs is Southeast Asia, India, these other areas that use a lot of Chinese content, Southeast Asia in particular, and we have giant trade deficits with them, Vietnam, for example. And then the next highest tariff rates, and these are usually about 15 percent, folks who are allies but with whom we have big trade issues: Korea, Japan, Europe, etc. And then the lowest tariff rates are really in the Western Hemisphere, where we want our supply chains to be, where it’s very secure. So you can really see almost like concentric rings going out from China, what the tariff rates are like. We have a couple outliers right now. India has a higher tariff for some geopolitical reasons. They buy Russian oil. Brazil has some higher tariffs. Economy & Education: U.S. trade rep. Greer and teacher’s union head Weingarten | The ConversationSharePlay Video We were close to a deal there over the summer and it got derailed. What happened there? The president wants deals but he only wants good deals. And so whenever you present a deal to the president, the question is, am I better off with just having the tariff? And the assessment of the deal in the summer with India was, well, I think we’re just better off with the tariff than with the potential deal. But that has not stopped us from continuing conversations. It’s still going quite well, I would say, with the Indians. There’s a separate issue where they were buying Russian oil. They’ve stopped doing that largely now. So I think we could see some tariff modification at some point for them. But I’m confident that we’ll get a deal with India at some point in the future, maybe the near future. It’ll be up to the president and Prime Minister Modi. Have you been involved at all in talking about a potential future trading partnership with Russia after the end of the war? Not very much. Even before the war, we didn’t have a huge trading relationship with Russia. We would get oil and steel and some fertilizer from them. We’d ship them cars and some ag products. So it was never a giant trading relationship. If the war ends then obviously there may be opportunity there. But we’re really focused on big export markets. There’s been a ton of debate about the short, medium and long term impact of these tariffs. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development just released a report saying the world economy has been surprisingly resilient in the face of Trump’s trade wars, but they added that they expect higher tariffs to gradually result in higher prices and reduce growth in household consumption and business investment. How do you respond to that assessment and are you worried about some economic pain in the short term? I just look at the data, right? They’re saying we think it’ll lead to lower growth in the future or higher prices or something, but they’ve been saying that for a long time. And the data show that last quarter was 3.8 percent [annual] growth. The Atlanta Fed is projecting 4.2 percent growth next year. We’ve seen inflation in check. We’ve seen imported goods remain relatively low-priced. Where we see prices high are things like housing and health care, because Obamacare is a disaster. The Supreme Court is weighing whether to narrow the president’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — IEEPA — which is the 1970s-era law that the administration has cited for imposing many of these tariffs. How are you preparing for the possibility that one of these main tariff authorities you’ve been using could be constrained? First of all, we believe the law and the facts are on our side. This Supreme Court has talked about how important it is to simply analyze the plain text of the law. And if you look at the plain text, it says the president, if he determines there’s an emergency, he can regulate imports. And he’s determined there’s an emergency and he’s regulating imports, which is the tariff. Now, we’ve been thinking about this plan for five years or longer. Since the first term. So you can be sure that when we came to the president at the beginning of the term, we had a lot of different options. IEEPA is the most appropriate because there is an emergency with the trade deficit and the loss of manufacturing, and it has the flexibility that you need to respond to the type of emergency that there is. My message is tariffs are going to be a part of the policy landscape going forward. Are there other ways to do it? Courts during this process have actually cited those different tools. And while we certainly can use those, IEEPA is the best tool. It fits the situation, and we’re looking forward to hearing back from the Supreme Court soon. But you’re prepared for alternative measures if they do decide to constrain IEEPA? Well, I’m not going to go into too much detail about that, or else I’ll get in trouble with my general counsel. But you’ve got something in your back pocket. Of course. Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on this, the administration’s reciprocal tariffs could be reversed by a future president. Is there any plan to go to Congress to try to codify any of this stuff? Well, if I were Congress, I would codify it. I have heard from a handful of members of Congress from all over the ideological spectrum, whether left or right or progressive or conservative, free trader or protectionist — however you want to characterize it. I’ve heard a lot of interest in this and for a lot of reasons. People have seen what I just described, which is that you can implement tariffs and have growth at the same time. You can protect your supply chains and have wages increase. You can do all of these things together, especially if you couple it with good energy policy, etc. I’ve also had members of Congress come to me, people who maybe weren’t fans of tariffs two years ago, and they said, “This is actually real money that’s coming in that can be used to pay down the debt or pay for other things or finance our reindustrialization.” Who are those members? Well, I won’t betray their confidences. You said that some members are telling you, “Hey, I’ve changed my mind on tariffs.” There are other members that have spoken privately or publicly, saying “These tariffs are hurting my constituents,” particularly people in farm states. I’m thinking GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley and Rand Paul and a number of folks that have come out and said they’re concerned. What do you say to members of Congress who feel that this is not beneficial for their folks? Well Sen. Paul is a little bit of a man on an island on this issue. Well sure, but Rep. Don Bacon — He [Paul] compared me to a Soviet commissar in some comments. All right, we’ll leave Rand Paul on the side here, but there are others like Bacon and Grassley and other folks that have voiced some concerns. I’ve talked to Sen. Grassley a lot, and he knows a lot about trade. He’s been around a long time and as a general matter, it sounds to me frequently that he is quite aligned with the president in terms of wanting to get foreign market access, particularly for his folks who are trying to sell pork and soybeans overseas. We have made sure, in addition to securing soybean purchases from China, who’s a big customer, to open markets in Southeast Asia in particular for soybeans. Markets that were never open before. Now these countries are taking down their tariff, they’re taking down their non-tariff barriers. And so on that, I think we’re aligned. There’s always concern when you’re changing what’s a 70-year trade policy to something new, and there can be frictions. But we are careful to listen to these folks again, from both sides of the aisle, find out what their concerns are and respond to them. The president did exempt some agricultural imports from tariffs amid ongoing concerns about higher prices. Why didn’t he do that from the beginning? How did that shift come about? First of all, inflation’s been in check. So let’s just clear the air on that. Secondly, in early September, the president signaled, he put out an executive order, and we made a list of all the — whether it’s agricultural goods or minerals or things that physically can’t be grown in the United States or extracted from the United States. The rocks aren’t here, or you can’t grow a banana here, on any scale. So in early September, he put out an executive order. He said, as I do deals with countries, I will release tariffs on these items. Why? Because we get them from those countries. There seems to be a real resistance in the language around tariffs to say that tariffs are causing higher prices. Nobody wants to really say that. But in making the exemptions, aren’t you basically acknowledging that tariffs do lead to higher prices on products? No. Okay. Can you explain? There’s never really a 1-to-1 with a tariff. In the first term, when we put tariffs on China, inflation actually went down. As we were putting tariffs in place, inflation went down. We’ve seen a similar effect here. When the president says, “We’re going to have deals with you folks,” you have to have leverage, right? And so you keep tariffs on folks for all kinds of things and it becomes a carrot. So it’s a lot easier for me to go to Ecuador or Indonesia or Vietnam and say, “Listen, if you do a deal with us and we’ve announced frameworks or full agreements with all these countries I just mentioned, then at a given time, we will release these things because obviously we don’t make them.” When you have a tariff, it doesn’t necessarily go through to the consumer. I don’t want to get too technical here for you, except I’m kind of nerdy about it. But sometimes does it? I mean it can, right? Like on those things that you mentioned, like coffee and bananas and all of that stuff? It depends on what the production economy is like. And when I say production economy, say bananas, if you have a hundred banana producers overseas, they’re all going to compete for market share in the U.S. because we’re the biggest consumer of a lot of these things. And so they will compete to eat the tariff. Do you see what I’m saying? I do, but when voters who don’t understand this are going to the grocery store and seeing that prices haven’t gone down, how do you tackle that with all the leverage that you’re talking about? Well, I can’t control the weather in Brazil with a tariff. Coffee prices, for example, have been going up for two years. Before there was ever a tariff on coffee for six months or whatever we had. And there are secular pricing trends in coffee and cocoa that were going on well before. And beef, these kinds of things. All that being said, we don’t have to have a tariff on these things. We don’t make them here. We can have a tariff on them for leverage, which is how the president used them. It’s how he said he was going to use it. He signaled in September, these are for leverage to finish the deals. So we were well placed two months later once we announced the rest of our deals to take the tariff off. The US-Mexico-Canada agreement — USMCA — that Trump negotiated in his first term is facing a mandatory review next year. What are the top changes that the administration is looking to make? When you think about the U.S., Canada, Mexico agreement, there are a few things we trade among us in a massive way. One of them is automobiles, another’s agriculture, another is energy. With respect to the auto trade, the goal is to make more autos in the United States of America. Mexico has been a huge beneficiary of NAFTA and then of USMCA. And so the president, earlier in his second term, imposed tariffs on autos globally, including on Mexico. So there’s an overlap between those tariffs and our agreement and USMCA. And those tariffs, which are about 25 percent, are layered over USMCA. Now all of that being said, we can look at the underlying rules of USMCA. If something comes in and gets special duty treatment or a lower tariff, there’s usually a rule of origin associated with it that says a certain amount of this widget has to come from the region. Otherwise you have to pay a higher tariff. We can change some of those rules to make them tighter, to have a higher percentage have to come from the United States. Those are the kinds of things we can do. There’s also a bunch of stuff in Mexico and Canada where maybe they discriminate against our companies. It could be telecom companies or it could be our corn exports. There are a variety of little things like that that may seem small and don’t lend themselves to sound bites, but they mean a lot for agricultural producers. Is there still a scenario where the U.S. could walk away from USMCA or is that off the table at this point? I mean that’s always a scenario, right? The president’s view is he only wants deals that are a good deal. The reason why we built a review period into USMCA was in case we needed to revise it, review it or exit it. I have heard from a lot of folks how important USMCA is. Canada and Mexico are huge export markets for us. I was in the White House yesterday, and we were talking about USMCA. What about Mexico? What about Canada? You know, the possibility that we kind of negotiate separately with them, right? Their economies are subject to it. Yeah, where’s his head at right now? Listen, our relationship with the Canadian economy is totally different than our relationship with the Mexican economy. The labor situation’s different, the stuff that’s being made is different, the export and import profile is different. It actually doesn’t make a ton of economic sense why we would marry those three together. The actual trade between Canada and Mexico is much smaller than the trade between the U.S. and Canada and U.S. and Mexico. Sometimes you’ll hear people say, “Oh, well, you know, USMCA, it’s a $31 trillion agreement.” It’s like, well, yeah, but like $29 trillion is us. So I think it makes sense to talk to them separately about that agreement. A lot of the underlying rules are helpful and you know our exporters benefit from them, but we have to make sure that we are getting the benefit of our bargain on USMCA. You were in Brussels recently, talking about deals. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said when he was over there that the U.S. could modify its approach on steel and aluminum tariffs if the EU reconsidered its digital rules. Some European officials were a little irked by that and interpreted it as targeting the EU’s flagship tech regulations, including the Digital Markets Act. Europe’s antitrust chief, Teresa Ribera told POLITICO that Washington is using “blackmail” to strong-arm the EU. What’s your response to that? That’s a totally extreme thing to say. The problem is the Digital Markets Act and other European digital regulations and regulations outside of digital, they actually target U.S. companies. And how do we know that? First of all, when all these laws were being passed, all the European parliamentarians and all the leaders in Europe were saying, “We’re going to implement these laws to get Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.” In fact, they have certain taxes over there, and they call them GAFA tax. The acronym is for American companies. And then they have these thresholds built into these laws where if you meet a certain global revenue threshold or you have a certain business model, and just magically they only capture U.S. companies. We reported last month that the European Commission was set to present a list to you of sectors that it wants to be exempted from U.S. tariffs. The list was expected to include medical devices, wine — which is very important to me — spirits, beers and pasta. Where do those deliberations stand? Well, they did not present such a list. Ah! And the reason why is because under our deal from the summer, the United States has already adjusted its tariff levels for Europe, and Europe is still adjusting its tariffs. And I don’t say this to be critical. They have a legal process they have to go through, and they’re proceeding through it as quickly as they can, I think. So it would be weird for them to come and say, “We haven’t finished making our tariff adjustments yet, and we want more from you.” Listen, if they want to come and talk about other tariff adjustments, that’ll be up to the president and that kind of thing. But it’s a sequencing issue. Like why would I give them more tariff relief before they’ve done their part of the bargain, right? That doesn’t make sense. Trump talked about tariffs on the campaign trail, but I don’t think a lot of the world, particularly our allies in Europe, were necessarily prepared for the scale, as you mentioned earlier. When you were in Brussels, for example, can you give me a little bit of a behind-the-scenes on what those conversations are like when you sit across a table? Sure. So we are eleven months into this presidency. And I would say that most of our European partners have frankly become quite pragmatic. In the first term, when we talked about tariffs and changing the global structure, there was a lot of almost religious-sounding sermonizing from the Europeans. For them, international institutions and what they believe is international law, this is like religion. It’s their religion, and they have these high priests and the European Commission, all these places. But the folks we’re dealing with right now in the European Commission, President von der Leyen, the trade commissioner, these are pragmatic folks. They understand the facts on the ground. They understand the U.S. view. They understand we have these huge trade deficits that are not sustainable. And so the conversations are constructive. We’re not fighting about policy, we’re talking about implementation. So that’s all positive. All that being said, there are two or three countries that still like to sermonize a little bit about this. The ambassador from one country came to me and said, “Well, how can you use these tariffs against us? You know, tariffs are bad, blah, blah, blah.” I said, if tariffs are so bad, then how come your tariffs on us are so high still? And he said, “Well, I’m not trying to negotiate.” But I mean, that’s my point. They come and they say, “Well, you shouldn’t have tariffs,” but European tariffs have been higher on the U.S. historically for many years. You said the conversations are productive and pragmatic now. Is that a shift from early this year? Yes. Yes, a hundred percent. So where does the EU deal stand? We had our joint statement in August. We’ve adjusted our tariffs to be a little bit lower for them. They’re in the process of adjusting theirs. We have a lot of non-tariff barriers that we face in Europe, regulatory constraints, certifications, inspection regimes, things that are duplicative, things that gum up trade between the United States and Europe. Did Brussels move that all forward? I would say so. It was less of a negotiating trip and more of taking stock of where we are, where we’re divergent and next steps. We have a small team coming over from the Europeans next week to really talk about how we can better memorialize changes in these non-tariff barriers going forward. Because even though the Europeans are taking down most of their tariffs for us, if you take down the tariff but there’s still non-tariff barriers, it’s not effective market access. So we have to do both the tariffs and the non-tariff barriers. We can’t talk about trade without talking about China. What is the administration’s endgame with China? Is it coexistence? Is it decoupling? Is it selective engagement? What is it? Well, it’s funny because Washington creates these kind of fake categories. They’ll say, “Oh, well, either you’re a China hawk or a China dove.” The way we think about it in the administration is we’re pro-American. We’re not anti-China. We’re not China doves. We’re not China hawks. We are pro-American. I think you meant to say America First. Well, yes, America First. Thank you. And sometimes you hear people saying, “For America to win, China has to lose.” I just don’t think that’s the case. I mean, the reality is we are going to do what’s right for America in terms of trade. And in some cases, it means we have to have a tariff on countries, higher tariffs on some, like China, because they’re a bigger issue with respect to trade. They have more trade cheating, they have more subsidies and that kind of thing. If China still manages to be successful? Fine. We’re not here to try to contain China. We’re here to make sure that America has a strong national security, strong economic security, that our workers have jobs that are good for them in the towns and cities where they live, that they can raise a family. That’s what we’re trying to do. If China rises or falls on that, that’s kind of up to them. We’re happy to work with them. They have their own plans. One thing I will say is people act like American policy drives Chinese reaction, that China’s just always reacting to us. And I think they want us to think that, but they’re agents unto themselves. They publish a new policy every five years. They announced this Made in China 2025 project in 2015, well before President Trump was the president. So they have their own economic plans, which are oftentimes adverse to our interests, and so we will control for that, whether through tariffs or other measures. We just saw voters in this last election in November clearly send a message that affordability, cost of living really, really matters. What can you tell the American people about what they can expect to see going into next year? How will all of this impact not the markets, but their day-to-day? What I would say is trade, it’s not a big factor in the affordability discussion. When you look at affordability, it’s really about the crazy high expenses for health care that were engendered by Obamacare, which was a disaster. It’s about housing expenses that went way up during the Biden years and are still — But some people, as they’re shopping for Christmas, are connecting prices at Walmart and at the grocery store to the affordability conversation. I’ve talked to Walmart officials, I’ve talked to all kinds of officials, and they have said that they’re not raising prices. At back-to-school time in September, they say we’re not raising prices. They’re still doing their rollback. I know that’s a press narrative, but it’s actually not a true narrative. When you talk about affordability, people are worried about it. People are worried about housing, they’re worried about healthcare — things we don’t import. But where trade comes into it is when you have a trade system in place that protects U.S. jobs, you get higher incomes. So the blue collar wages are up this year. That’s what matters. In the first term, we had real income increase, up until the pandemic, which was like this black swan event. That’s what we’re trying to do with trade. Trade is not, “Let’s manage affordability through trade.” Trade is, “Let’s make sure we have good paying jobs here, especially for that working class whose jobs went away to Mexico or Vietnam or China. And so if you have blue-collar wages going up, whatever price effects are going on from all kinds of things in the economy — as long as the real income is outpacing whatever price effects there are — that’s what we’re looking for. That’s what we’re seeing. What about those tariff dividends that the president has floated? Well, you can talk to Scott Bessent. I don’t control the money. I just put the tariffs on to make the deals.

di Pietro Francesco Maria de Sarlo In linea di principio la politica estera di uno Stato deriva da quello che ritiene sia l’interesse nazionale. Ora riesce difficile immaginare quale interesse sia stato difeso con il voto del Parlamento europeo che vieta in modo permanente l’import di gas dalla Russia. Che utilità ha la Ue nel vietarsi ora e in futuro l’approvvigionamento di gas a basso costo dalla Russia? Come andrà a finire è chiaro se so considera la questione dell’invio di armi in Ucraina. Gli Usa le danno all’Ucraina ma a pagare sono gli Stati europei. La guerra continua, l’Europa si impoverisce e il Pil americano aumenta. Con il gas finirà così: Trump e Putin stringeranno un accordo in base al quale gli Usa acquisteranno gas a basso costo dalla Russia e gli Usa lo rivenderanno alla Ue a prezzi multipli. C’è qualcosa di perverso in questa guerra in Ucraina. L’Europa fa da bancomat per Zelens’kyj che, caso unico nella Storia, decide da solo come condurre guerra e pace e l’Europa fa da ente pagatore senza neanche riservarsi il diritto di dire che non possiamo continuare a finanziarla. Cosa stiamo difendendo? Il diritto dell’Ucraina di autodeterminarsi per entrare nella Nato oppure la necessità di un regime change in Russia? Per avere cosa? Gas a prezzi amichevoli che, specialmente alla Germania, Putin ha sempre garantito? I più acculturati sapranno che già nel 1823 il presidente James Monroe affermò che tutto quello che accadeva nel continente americano era di esclusiva competenza dello Stato Federale e le possibili ingerenze di potenze straniere sarebbero state considerate un atto ostile. Basta qualche nome di scrittori russo-ucraini per capire che la Russia considera l’Ucraina un pezzo di sé: la Piccola Russia. Se nel dna degli Usa il continente Nord Americano è considerato il giardino di casa perché pare invece ‘strano’ che i russi considerino inaccettabile che l’Ucraina faccia parte della Nato? Certamente ci sono dei principi alti e nobili da cui non si può deflettere: l’autodeterminazione dei popoli, il rispetto del diritto internazionale e il principio che i confini non si cambiano con la forza. Nobilissimi intenti che Mattarella ci ricorda quotidianamente insieme ai volenterosi e a Ursula e Kallas. Ma tutto questo sdegno naufraga miseramente appena ci si sposta in Israele. C’è un genocidio in atto in cui gli stessi attori che sono così intransigenti con la Russia sono invece indifferenti se non complici con Israele. Gli ucraini che resistono ai russi sono considerati eroi. Ai palestinesi invece è vietato combattere per la propria libertà. Confesso sono stupido e non capisco. E quindi cosa guida la politica estera europea? Non gli interessi, non i principi che dovrebbero valere sempre. E allora cosa? Mi piacerebbe capirlo, perché oggi pare che l’unica cosa che guida la politica europea sia ingrassare i fabbricanti di guerra. L’Alto rappresentante della politica estera europea, Kaja Kallas, è assente da tutti i tavoli. Non parla con Putin, e già qui se non si parla con il nemico, vero o presunto, non si capisce a cosa serva la diplomazia europea, ma non parla neanche con Xi e neanche con Trump. E mi chiedo perché mai qualcuno di quelli che contano al Mondo avendo la responsabilità di miliardi di esseri umani dovrebbe perdere tempo a parlare con Kaja. La Ue ha volutamente limitato il proprio campo di gioco. I leader europei parlano solo tra di loro e con Zelens’kyj e ripetono gli stessi slogan vuoti: la retorica invaso invasore e la pace giusta. Vendono merce avariata perché nella Storia non c’è mai stata una guerra senza un invasore e un invaso e neanche una pace giusta. Sono diventati inutili e pericolosi. Insomma che che obiettivi strategici ha la Ue in questo conflitto? E come si fa a chiedere ai popoli di armarsi e rinunciare a welfare e diritti senza chiarirli. Tutti quelli che continuano a insistere con il riarmo, Elly compresa, dovrebbero dichiarare intenti e scopi di questo suicidio Ue. IL BLOG SOSTENITORE OSPITA I POST SCRITTI DAI LETTORI CHE HANNO DECISO DI CONTRIBUIRE ALLA CRESCITA DE ILFATTOQUOTIDIANO.IT, SOTTOSCRIVENDO L’OFFERTA SOSTENITORE E DIVENTANDO COSÌ PARTE ATTIVA DELLA NOSTRA COMMUNITY. TRA I POST INVIATI, PETER GOMEZ E LA REDAZIONE SELEZIONERANNO E PUBBLICHERANNO QUELLI PIÙ INTERESSANTI. QUESTO BLOG NASCE DA UN’IDEA DEI LETTORI, CONTINUATE A RENDERLO IL VOSTRO SPAZIO. DIVENTARE SOSTENITORE SIGNIFICA ANCHE METTERCI LA FACCIA, LA FIRMA O L’IMPEGNO: ADERISCI ALLE NOSTRE CAMPAGNE, PENSATE PERCHÉ TU ABBIA UN RUOLO ATTIVO! SE VUOI PARTECIPARE, AL PREZZO DI “UN CAPPUCCINO ALLA SETTIMANA” POTRAI ANCHE SEGUIRE IN DIRETTA STREAMING LA RIUNIONE DI REDAZIONE DEL GIOVEDÌ – MANDANDOCI IN TEMPO REALE SUGGERIMENTI, NOTIZIE E IDEE – E ACCEDERE AL FORUM RISERVATO DOVE DISCUTERE E INTERAGIRE CON LA REDAZIONE. SCOPRI TUTTI I VANTAGGI! L'articolo L’Europa, ridotta a bancomat di Zelensky, si vieta il gas russo. C’è qualcosa di perverso in questa guerra proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.

BRUSSELS — The EU will begin to ban all Russian gas imports to the bloc early next year after lawmakers, officials and diplomatic negotiators struck a last-minute deal over a key piece of legislation set to reshape Europe’s energy sector. Put forward over the summer, the bill is designed to kill off the EU’s lingering Russian energy dependency at a critical juncture in the Ukraine war, with Russia advancing steadily and Kyiv fast running out of cash. While Europe’s imports of Russian gas have fallen sharply since 2022, the country still accounts for around 19 percent of its total intake. The EU is already set to sanction Russian gas imports, but those measures are temporary and subject to renewal every six months. The new legislation is designed to make that rupture permanent and put member countries that still operate contracts with Russia on a surer footing in the event of legal action. “We were paying to Russia €12 billion per month at the beginning of the war for fossil fuels. Now we’re down to €1.5 billion per month … We aim to bring it down to zero,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters on Wednesday. “This is a good day for Europe and for our independence from Russian fossil fuels — this is how we make Europe resilient.” “We wanted to show that Europe will never go back to Russian fossil fuels again — and the only ones who lost today are Russia and Mr Putin,” Green MEP Ville Niinistö, one of the Parliament’s two lead negotiators on the file, told POLITICO. The law will enter into force on Jan. 1 next year and then apply to different kinds of gas in phases. Spot market purchases of gas will be banned almost immediately, while existing short- and long-term contracts will be banned in 2026 and 2027. A prohibition on pipeline gas will come into effect in September 2027, owing to concerns from landlocked countries reliant on Russian gas, such as Slovakia and Hungary. Finalized in barely six months, the law was the subject of fierce disagreements in recent weeks as the European Parliament’s more ambitious stance irked member countries concerned about the legal risks and technical difficulties of the ban. But despite fears that talks would be prolonged and even spill over into the new year, negotiators reached a compromise on key aspects of the law at the last minute. Now both sides can claim victory. Lawmakers, for instance, repeatedly pushed for an earlier timeline and ultimately ensured that none of the bans would enter into force later than 2027. The Parliament also secured commitments from national capitals to impose one of three penalties on companies that breach the rule: a lump sum penalty of €40 million, 3.5 percent of a company’s annual turnover, or 300 percent of the value of the offending transaction. Where the Council included its demands, the Parliament was able to water them down. For instance, lawmakers convinced member countries to tighten a controversial clause allowing countries facing energy crises to lift the ban — suspensions will only last four weeks at a time and will need to be reviewed by Parliament and the Commission. The Parliament also backed down from a push for a parallel ban on Russian crude imports in the same file after the Commission promised a separate bill early next year, as first reported by POLITICO. The Council did push through its controversial list of “safe” countries from which the EU can still import gas without rigorous vetting. Lawmakers complained that the list includes Qatar, Algeria and Nigeria, but have now accepted it, so long as countries can be excised from the list if they offend. MEPs gushed that they got far more than they expected and weren’t trampled by seasoned diplomats, as some had feared. “We have strengthened the European Commission’s initial proposal by introducing a pathway towards a ban on oil and its products, ending long-term contracts sooner than originally proposed, and secured harmonized EU penalties for non-compliance,” European People’s Party MEP Inese Vaidere, who also led the file, told POLITICO. “We achieved more than my realistic landing scenario — earlier phase-outs, tougher penalties, and closing the loopholes that let Russian gas sneak in,” said Niinistö. “This was about proving European unity — Parliament, Council and Commission on the same side — and showing citizens that we can cut Russia’s revenues faster and more decisively than ever proposed before.”

By ALEX PERRY in Paris Illustrations by Julius Maxim for POLITICO This article is also available in French When Patrick Pouyanné decided to spend billions on a giant natural gas field in a faraway warzone, he made the call alone, over a single dinner, with the head of a rival energy company. Pouyanné, the chairman and CEO of what was then called Total, was dining with Vicki Hollub, CEO of Houston-based Occidental Petroleum. It was late April 2019, and Hollub was in a David and Goliath battle with the American energy behemoth Chevron to buy Anadarko, like Occidental a mid-sized Texan oil and gas explorer. The American investor Warren Buffett was set to back Hollub with $10 billion, but it wasn’t enough. So Hollub flew to Paris to meet Pouyanné. Hollub’s proposal: Pouyanné would pitch in $8.8 billion in exchange for Anadarko’s four African gas fields, including a vast deep-sea reserve off northern Mozambique, an area in the grip of an Islamist insurgency. The Frenchman, who had previously approached Anadarko about the same assets, said yes in a matter of minutes. Advertisement “What are the strengths of Total?” Pouyanné explained to an Atlantic Council event in Washington a few weeks later. “LNG,” he went on, and the “Middle East and Africa,” regions where the company has operated since its origin in the colonial era. “So it’s just fitting exactly and perfectly.” Total, “a large corporation,” could be “so agile,” he said, because of the efficacy of his decision-making, and the clarity of his vision to shift from oil to lower-emission gas, extracted from lightly regulated foreign lands. In the end, “it [was] just a matter of sending an email to my colleague [Hollub],” he added. “This is the way to make good deals.” Six years later, it’s fair to ask if Pouyanné was a little hasty. On Nov. 17, a European human rights NGO filed a criminal complaint with the national counterterrorism prosecutor’s office in Paris accusing TotalEnergies of complicity in war crimes, torture and enforced disappearances, all in northern Mozambique. The allegations turn on a massacre, first reported by POLITICO last year, in which Mozambican soldiers crammed about 200 men into shipping containers at the gatehouse of a massive gas liquefaction plant TotalEnergies is building in the country, then killed most of them over the next three months. The complaint, submitted by the nonprofit European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), alleges that TotalEnergies became an accomplice in the “so-called ‘container massacre’” because it “directly financed and materially supported” the Mozambican soldiers who carried out the executions, which took place between June and September 2021. “TotalEnergies knew that the Mozambican armed forces had been accused of systematic human rights violations, yet continued to support them with the only objective to secure its facility,” said Clara Gonzales, co-director of the business and human rights program at ECCHR, a Berlin-based group specializing in international law that has spent the past year corroborating the atrocity. In response to the complaint, a company spokesperson in Paris said in a written statement: “TotalEnergies takes these allegations very seriously” and would “comply with the lawful investigation prerogatives of the French authorities.” Last year, in response to questions by POLITICO, the company — through its subsidiary Mozambique LNG — said it had no knowledge of the container killings, adding that its “extensive research” had “not identified any information nor evidence that would corroborate the allegations of severe abuses and torture.” This week, the spokesperson repeated that position. Advertisement Asked in May in the French National Assembly about the killings, Pouyanné dismissed “these false allegations” and demanded the company’s accusers “put their evidence on the table.” Questioned about the complaint on French television this week, he again rejected the allegations and described them as a “smear campaign” motivated by the fact that TotalEnergies produces fossil fuels. The war crimes complaint is based on POLITICO’s reporting and other open-source evidence. In the last year, the container killings have been confirmed by the French newspaper Le Monde and the British journalism nonprofit Source Material. The British Mozambique expert Professor Joseph Hanlon also said the atrocity was “well known locally,” and an investigation carried out by UK Export Finance (UKEF) — the British state lender, which is currently weighing delivery of a $1.15 billion loan to Total’s project — has heard evidence from its survivors.  The massacre was an apparent reprisal for a devastating attack three months earlier by ISIS-affiliated rebels on the nearby town of Palma, just south of the border with Tanzania, which killed 1,354 civilians, including 55 of Total’s workforce, according to a house-to-house survey carried out by POLITICO. Of those ISIS murdered, it beheaded 330. TotalEnergies has previously noted that Mozambique has yet to issue an official toll for the Palma massacre. In March, a French magistrate began investigating TotalEnergies for involuntary manslaughter over allegations that it abandoned its contractors to the onslaught.  After the jihadis left the area in late June, Mozambican commandos based at Total’s gas concession rounded up 500 villagers and accused them of backing the rebels. They separated men from women and children, raped several of the women, then forced the 180-250 men into two metal windowless shipping containers that formed a rudimentary fortified entrance to Total’s plant. There, the soldiers kept their prisoners in 30-degree-Celsius heat for three months. According to eleven survivors and two witnesses, some men suffocated. Fed handfuls of rice and bottle caps of water, others starved or died of thirst. The soldiers beat and tortured many of the rest. Finally, they began taking them away in groups and executing them. Only 26 men survived, saved when a Rwandan intervention force, deployed to fight ISIS, discovered the operation. A second house-to-house survey conducted by POLITICO later identified by name 97 of those killed or disappeared. Along with the new ECCHR complaint and the British inquiry, the killings are the subject of three other separate investigations: by the Mozambican Attorney General, the Mozambican National Human Rights Commission, and the Dutch government, which is probing $1.2 billion in Dutch state financing for TotalEnergies’ project. This week’s complaint was lodged with the offices of the French National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor, whose remit includes war crimes. The prosecutor will decide whether to open a formal inquiry and appoint an investigating magistrate.  Should the case move ahead, TotalEnergies will face the prospect of a war crimes trial.  Such an eventuality would represent a spectacular fall from grace for a business that once held a central place in French national identity and a CEO whose hard-nosed resolve made him an icon of global business. Should a French court eventually find the company or its executives liable in the container killings, the penalties could include fines and, possibly, jail terms for anybody indicted. How did TotalEnergies get here? How did Patrick Pouyanné? ‘POUYANNÉ PETROLEUM’ Born in Normandy in 1963, the son of a provincial customs official and a post office worker, Pouyanné elevated himself to the French elite by winning selection to the École Polytechnique, the country’s foremost engineering university, and then the École des Mines, where France’s future captains of industry are made. Following a few years in politics as a minister’s aide, he joined the French state petroleum company Elf as an exploration manager in Angola in 1996. After moving to Qatar in 1999 as Elf merged with Total, Pouyanné ascended to the top job at Total in 2014 after his predecessor, Christophe de Margerie, was killed in a plane crash in Moscow. Pouyanné led by reason, and force of will. “To be number one in a group like Total … is to find yourself alone,” he said in 2020. “When I say ‘I don’t agree,’ sometimes the walls shake. I realize this.” A decade at the top has seen Pouyanné, 62, transform a company of 100,000 employees in 130 countries into a one-man show — “Pouyanné Petroleum,” as the industry quip goes. His frequent public appearances, and his unapologetically firm hand, have made him a celebrated figure in international business. “Patrick Pouyanné has done an extraordinary job leading TotalEnergies in a complex environment, delivering outstanding financial results and engaging the company in the energy transition quicker and stronger than its peers,” Jacques Aschenbroich, the company’s lead independent director, said in 2023. Advertisement Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega, director of energy and climate at the French Institute of International Relations, agreed. “His involvement is his strength,” he said. “He’s able to take a decision quickly, in a much more agile and rapid way.” Still, Eyl-Mazzega said, “I’m not sure everyone is happy to work with him. You have to keep up the pace. There are often departures. He’s quite direct and frank.”  Among employees, Pouyanné’s lumbering frame and overbearing manner has earned him a nickname: The Bulldozer. The moniker isn’t always affectionate. A former Total executive who dealt regularly with him recalled him as unpleasantly aggressive, “banging fists on the table.” The effect, the executive said, has been to disempower the staff: “The structure of Total is trying to guess what Pouyanné wants to do. You can’t make any decisions unless it goes to the CEO.” In a statement to POLITICO, TotalEnergies called such depictions “misplaced and baseless.” ‘DON’T ASK US TO TAKE THE MORAL HIGH GROUND’ What’s not in dispute is how Pouyanné has used his authority to shape Total’s answer to the big 21st-century oil and gas puzzle: how to square demand for fossil fuels with simultaneous demands from politicians and climate campaigners to eliminate them. His response has been diversification, moving the company away from high-emission fuels towards becoming a broad-based, ethical energy supplier, centered on low-carbon gas, solar and wind, and pledging to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The change was symbolized by Pouyanné’s renaming of the company TotalEnergies in 2021. A second, more unsung element of Pouyanné’s strategy has been moving much of his remaining fossil fuel operation beyond Western regulation.  Speaking to an audience at Chatham House in London in 2017, he said the catalyst for his move to favor reserves in poorer, less tightly policed parts of the planet was the penalties imposed on the British energy giant BP in the United States following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, in which 11 men died and an oil slick devastated the Gulf of Mexico coast. Pouyanné declared that the fines — between $62 billion and $142 billion, depending on the calculation used — represented an excessive “legal risk” to oil and gas development in the West. While other, more troubled territories came with their share of dangers, Pouyanné put the cost of failure of any project outside the West at a more manageable $2 to $3 billion, according to his Chatham House remarks. As a way of assessing risk, it was efficient. “Other players would spend a lot of money on consultancies and write 70 reports to conclude that a project is risky,” Eyl-Mazzega said. “Pouyanné, on the other hand, is prepared to take risks.” Asked by the French Senate in 2024 how he chose where to invest, however, Pouyanné admitted that his math was strictly about the bottom line. “Don’t ask us to take the moral high ground,” he said. ‘A COLLAPSE WILL NOT PUT TOTAL IN DANGER’ The first oil and gas prospectors arrived in northern Mozambique in 2006 as part of a Western effort to broaden supply beyond the Middle East. When Anadarko found gas 25 miles out to sea in 2010, the talk was of Mozambique as the new Qatar. At 2.6 million acres, or about a third of the size of Belgium, Rovuma Basin Area 1 was a monster, thought to hold 75 trillion cubic feet of gas, or 1 percent of all global reserves. An adjacent field, Area 4, quickly snapped up by ExxonMobil, was thought to hold even more. To cope with the volume of production, Anadarko’s Area 1 consortium drew up a plan for a $20 billion onshore liquefaction plant. Together with ExxonMobil’s field, the cost of developing Mozambique’s gas was estimated at $50 billion, which would make it the biggest private investment ever made in Africa. But in 2017, an ISIS insurgency emerged to threaten those ambitions.  By the time Pouyanné was preparing to buy Anadarko’s 26.5 percent share in Area 1 two years later, what had begun as a ragtag revolt against government corruption in the northern province of Cabo Delgado had become a full-scale Islamist rebellion.  Insurgents were taking ever more territory, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and regularly staging mass beheadings. Even under construction, the gas plant was a regular target. It was run by Europeans and Americans, intending to make money for companies thousands of miles away while displacing 2,733 villagers to build their concession and banning fishermen from waters around their drill sites. After several attacks on plant traffic to and from the facility, in February 2019, the militants killed two project workers in a village attack and dismembered a contract driver in the road.  A further risk had its origins in a ban on foreigners carrying guns. That made the plant reliant for security on the Mozambican army and police, both of which had a well-documented record of criminality and repression. Initially, Pouyanné seemed unconcerned. The gas field was outside international law, as Mozambique had not ratified the Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court. And Pouyanné appeared to see the pursuit of high-risk, high-reward projects almost as an obligation for a deep-pocketed corporation, telling the Atlantic Council in May 2019, soon after he agreed the Mozambique deal, that Total was so big, it didn’t need to care — at least, not in the way of other, lesser companies or countries. “We love risk, so we have decided to embark on the Mozambique story,” he said. “Even if there is a collapse, [it] will [not] put Total in danger.” Advertisement In September 2019, when Total’s purchase was formally completed, the company declared in a press release: “The Mozambique LNG project is largely derisked.” In one of several statements to POLITICO, TotalEnergies explained the term echoed the boss’s focus on “the project’s commercial and financial fundamentals. To infer this was a dismissal of security concerns amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the sector operates.” Still, for workers at the project, it was an arresting statement, given that a Mozambique LNG worker had recently been chopped to pieces. Around the same time, the project managers at Anadarko, many of whom were now working for Total, tried to warn their new CEO of the danger posed by the insurgency. It was when they met Pouyanné, however, that “things then all started to unwind,” said one. Pouyanné regaled the team who had worked on the Mozambique project for years with a speech “on how brilliant Total was, and how brilliantly Total was going to run this project,” a second executive added. Pouyanné added he had “a French hero” running the company’s security: Denis Favier who, as a police commander, led a team of police commandos as they stormed a hijacked plane on the tarmac at Marseille in 1994, and in 2015, as France’s most senior policeman, commanded the operation to hunt and kill the Islamist brothers who shot dead 12 staff at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris. “This is easy for him,” Pouyanné said. Asked about the transition from Anadarko to Total, the company maintained it was responsive to all concerns expressed by former Anadarko workers. “We are not aware of any such dismissal of security concerns by TotalEnergies or its senior management,” the company said. “It is incorrect to state that advice from the ground was not listened to.” Still, after meeting Pouyanné, the old Anadarko team called their Mozambique staff together to brief them on their new boss. “Well, holy shit,” one manager began, according to a person present. “We’ve got a problem.” ‘VERY VULNERABLE’ A third former Anadarko staffer who stayed on to work for Total said that on taking over, the company also put on hold a decision to move most contractors and staff from hotels and compounds in Palma to inside its fortified camp — a costly move that Anadarko was planning in response to deteriorating security. “This was a danger I had worked so hard to eliminate,” the staffer said. “Palma was very vulnerable. Almost nobody was supposed to be [there]. But Total wouldn’t listen to me.” Other measures, such as grouping traffic to and from the plant in convoys and flanking them with drones, also ended. One project contractor who regularly made the run through rebel territory described the difference between Anadarko and Total as “night and day.” Then in June 2020, the rebels captured Mocimboa da Praia, the regional hub, and killed at least eight subcontractors. In late December that year, they staged another advance that brought them to Total’s gates. At that, Pouyanné reversed course and assumed personal oversight of the security operation, the first Anadarko manager said. Despite no expertise in security, “[he] had to get into every little last possible detail.” The second executive concurred. “It went from, ‘I don’t care, we’ve got the best security people in the business to run this’ to ‘Oh my God, this is a disaster, let me micromanage it and control it,’” he said. The company was “not aware of any … criticism that Mr. Pouyanné lacks the necessary expertise,” TotalEnergies said, adding the CEO had “first-hand experience of emergency evacuation … [from] when Total had to evacuate its staff from Yemen in 2015.” The insurgents’ advance prompted Pouyanné to order the evacuation of all TotalEnergies staff. By contrast, many contractors and subcontractors, some of them behind schedule because of Covid, were told to keep working, according to email exchanges among contractors seen by POLITICO. “Mozambique LNG did not differentiate between its own employees, its contractors or subcontractors when giving these instructions,” the company said, but added that it was not responsible for the decisions of its contractors. Advertisement Then, in February 2021, Pouyanné flew to Maputo, the Mozambican capital, to negotiate a new security deal with then Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi. Afterward, the two men announced the creation of the Joint Task Force, a 1,000-man unit of soldiers and armed police to be stationed inside the compound.  The deal envisaged that the new force would protect a 25-kilometer radius around the gas plant, including Palma and several villages. In practice, by concentrating so many soldiers and police inside the wire, it left Palma comparatively exposed. “It is incorrect to allege that Palma was left poorly defended,” the company said. “However, it is a fact that these security forces were overwhelmed by the magnitude and violence of the terrorist attacks in March 2021.” TotalEnergies added it is not correct to say that “Mr. Pouyanné personally managed the security deal setting up the Joint Task Force.” ‘TRAIN WRECK’ By this time, the company’s own human rights advisers were warning that by helping to create the Joint Task Force — to which the company agreed to pay what it described as “hardship payments” via a third party, as well as to equip it and accommodate it on its compound — Pouyanné was effectively making TotalEnergies a party to the conflict, and implicating it in any human rights abuses the soldiers carried out. Just as worrying was TotalEnergies’ insistence — according to a plant security manager, and confirmed by minutes of a Total presentation on security released under a Dutch freedom of information request — that all major security decisions be handled by a 20-man security team 5,000 miles away in Paris. That centralization seemed to help explain how, when the Islamists finally descended on Palma on March 24, 2021, Total was among the last to know. One Western security contractor told POLITICO he had pulled his people out 10 days before the assault, based on intelligence he had on guns and young men being pre-positioned in town. In the days immediately preceding the attack, villagers around Palma warned friends and relatives in town that they had seen the Islamists advancing. WhatsApp messages seen by POLITICO indicate contractors reported the same advance to plant security on March 22 and March 23. Advertisement Nonetheless, at 9 a.m. on March 24, TotalEnergies in Paris announced that it was safe for its staff to return. Hours later, the Islamists attacked. “Neither Mozambique LNG nor TotalEnergies received any specific ‘advance warnings’ of an impending attack prior to March 24,” the company said. Faced with a three-pronged advance by several hundred militants, the plant security manager said TotalEnergies’ hierarchical management pyramid was unable to cope. Ground staff could not respond to evolving events, paralyzed by the need to seek approval for decisions from Paris. Total’s country office in Maputo was also in limbo, according to the security manager, neither able to follow what was happening in real-time, nor authorized to respond.  ‘WHO CAN HELP US?!’ Two decisions, taken as the attack unfolded, compounded the havoc wreaked by the Islamists. The first was Total’s refusal to supply aviation fuel to the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), a small, South African private military contractor working with the Mozambican police. With the police and army overrun, DAG’s small helicopters represented the only functional military force in Palma and the only unit undertaking humanitarian rescues. But DAG’s choppers were limited by low supplies of jet fuel, forcing them to fly an hour away to refuel, and to ground their fleet intermittently. Total, as one of the world’s biggest makers of aviation fuel, with ample stocks at the gas plant, was in a position to help. But when DAG asked Total in Paris for assistance, it refused. “Word came down from the mountain,” DAG executive Max Dyck said, “and that was the way it was going to be.” Total has conceded that it refused fuel to DAG — out of concern for the rescuers’ human rights record, the company said — but made fuel available to the Mozambican security services. DAG later hired an independent lawyer to investigate its record, who exonerated the company. Advertisement A second problematic order was an edict, handed down by Pouyanné’s executives in Paris in the months before the massacre, according to the plant security manager, that should the rebels attack, gate security guards at the gas plant were to let no one in. It was an instruction that could only have been drawn up by someone ignorant of the area’s geography, the man said.  If the Islamists blocked the three roads in and out of Palma, as conventional tactics would prescribe, the only remaining ways out for the population of 60,000 would be by sea or air — both routes that went through TotalEnergies’s facility, with its port and airport. By barring the civilians’ way, the company would be exposing them. So it proved. TotalEnergies soon had 25,000 fleeing civilians at its gates, according to an internal company report obtained under a freedom of information request by an Italian NGO, Recommon. Among the crowd were hundreds of project subcontractors and workers. Witnesses described to POLITICO how families begged TotalEnergies’ guards to let them in. Mothers were passing their babies forward to be laid in front of the gates. But TotalEnergies in Paris refused to allow its guards on the ground to open up. On March 28, the fifth day of the attack, Paris authorized a ferry to evacuate 1,250 staff and workers from the gas plant, and make a single return trip to pick up 1,250 civilians, who had sneaked inside the perimeter. That still left tens of thousands stranded at its gates. On March 29, a TotalEnergies community relations manager in Paris made a panicked call to Caroline Brodeur, a contact at Oxfam America. “He’s like, ‘There’s this huge security situation in Mozambique!’” Brodeur said. “An escalation of violence! We will need to evacuate people! Who can help us? Which NGO can support us with logistics?’” Thirty minutes later, the man called back. “Wait,” he told Brodeur. “Don’t do anything.” TotalEnergies’ senior managers had overruled him, the man said. No outsiders were to be involved. “I think he was trying to do the right thing,” Brodeur said in an interview with POLITICO. “But after that, Total went silent.” Over the next two months, the jihadis killed hundreds of civilians in and around Palma and the gas plant before the Rwandan intervention force pushed them out. The second former Anadarko and Total executive said the rebels might have attacked Palma, whoever was in charge at the gas project. But Total’s distant, centralized management made a “train wreck … inevitable.” Advertisement TotalEnergies said its response to the attack “mitigated as much as was reasonably possible the consequences.” Confirming the phone call to Oxfam, it added: “There was no effort by whoever within TotalEnergies to shut any possibility for external assistance down.” The company was especially adamant that Pouyanné was not at fault.  “The allegation that Mr. Pouyanné’s management of TotalEnergies exacerbated the devastation caused by the attacks in Mozambique is entirely unsubstantiated,” it said. “Mr. Pouyanné takes the safety and security of the staff extremely seriously.” In his television appearance this week, Pouyanné defended the company’s performance. “We completely evacuated the site,” he said. “We were not present at that time.” He said he considered that TotalEnergies, whose security teams had helped “more than 2,000 civilians evacuate the area,” “had carried out heroic actions.” ‘AN ALMOST PERFECT DINNER PARTY’  TotalEnergies’ troubles in Mozambique have come amid a wider slump in the country’s fortunes and reputation. Years of climate protests outside the company’s annual general meetings in central Paris peaked in 2023 when police dispersed activists with batons and tear gas. For the last two years, TotalEnergies has retreated behind a line of security checks and riot police at its offices in Défense, in the western part of Paris. Though the company intended 2024, its centenary year, as a celebration, the company succeeded mostly in looking past its prime. When Pouyanné took over in 2014, Total was France’s biggest company, and 37th in the world. Today, it is France’s seventh largest and not even in the global top 100.  Several French media houses chose the occasion of TotalEnergies’ 100th birthday to declare open season on the company, portraying it as a serial offender on pollution, corruption, worker safety, and climate change. Pouyanné has also presided over a rift with the French establishment. Last year, when he suggested listing in New York to boost the stock, French President Emmanuel Macron berated him in public. Advertisement The division grew wider a few weeks later when the French Senate concluded a six-month inquiry into the company with a recommendation that the formerly state-owned enterprise be partly taken back into public ownership.  The company has faced five separate lawsuits, civil and criminal, claiming it is breaking French law on climate protection and corporate conduct.  In a sixth case, brought by environmentalists in Paris last month, a judge ordered TotalEnergies to remove advertising from its website claiming it was part of the solution to climate change. Given the company’s ongoing investments in fossil fuels, that was misleading, the judge said, decreeing that TotalEnergies take down its messaging and upload the court’s ruling instead. The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has also led protests against TotalEnergies’ East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline. That project, intended to pump oil 1,000 miles from Uganda across Tanzania to the Indian Ocean, is similarly embroiled in accusations of human rights abuses, drawing criticism from the European Parliament plus 28 banks and 29 insurance companies who have refused to finance it. Pouyanné has also taken hits to his personal brand. A low point came in 2022 when he chose the moment his countrymen were recovering from Covid and struggling with soaring fuel prices to defend his salary of €5,944,129 a year. He was “tired” of the accusation that he had received a 52 percent rise, he wrote on Twitter. His pay, he added, had merely been restored to pre-pandemic levels.  Overnight, the CEO became the unacceptable face of French capitalism. “Pouyanné lives in another galaxy, far, far away,” said one TV host. Under a picture of the CEO, an MP from the leftist France Unbowed movement wrote: “A name, a face. The obstacle in the way of a nation.” So heated and widely held is the contempt that in 2023 the company produced a guide for its French employees on how to handle it. Titled “An Almost Perfect Dinner Party,” the booklet lays out arguments and data that staff might use to defend themselves at social occasions. “Have you ever been questioned, during a dinner with family or friends, about a controversy concerning the Company?” it asked. “Did you have the factual elements to answer your guests?” ‘FALSE ALLEGATIONS’ The war crimes case lodged this week against TotalEnergies was filed in France, despite the alleged crimes occurring in Mozambique, because, it argues, TotalEnergies’ nationality establishes jurisdiction.  The case represents a dramatic example of the extension of international justice — the prosecution in one country of crimes committed in another. A movement forged in Nuremberg and Tokyo in the wake of World War II, the principles of international justice have been used more recently by national and international courts to bring warlords and dictators to trial — and by national courts to prosecute citizens or companies implicated in abuses abroad where local justice systems are weak. U.S. courts have ordered ExxonMobil and banana giant Chiquita to stand trial for complicity in atrocities committed in the late 1990s and early 2000s by soldiers or militias paid to protect their premises in Indonesia and Colombia, respectively. Exxon settled a week before the case opened in 2023. A Florida court ordered Chiquita to pay $38 million to the families of eight murdered Colombian men in June 2024; Chiquita’s appeal was denied that October.  In Sweden, two executives from Lundin Oil are currently on trial for complicity in war crimes after Sudanese troops and government militias killed an estimated 12,000 people between 1999 and 2003 as they cleared the area around a company drill site. The executives deny the accusations against them. Advertisement ECCHR has initiated several international justice cases. Most notably, in 2016, it and another legal non-profit, Sherpa, filed a criminal complaint in Paris against the French cement maker Lafarge, accusing its Syrian plant of paying millions of dollars in protection money to ISIS. Earlier this month, Lafarge and eight executives went on trial in Paris, accused of funding terrorism and breaking international sanctions — charges they deny. The war crimes complaint against TotalEnergies cites internal documents, obtained under freedom of information requests in Italy and the Netherlands, that show staff at the site knew the soldiers routinely committed human rights abuses against civilians while working for the company.  There were “regular community allegations of JTF [Joint Task Force] human rights violations,” read one, including “physical violence, and arrests/disappearances.” The report also referred to “troops who were allegedly involved in a [human rights] case in August [2021].” These were deemed so serious that TotalEnergies suspended pay to all 1,000 Joint Task Force soldiers and the army expelled 200 from the region, according to the internal document. The ECCHR complaint accuses TotalEnergies and “X”, a designation leaving open the possibility for the names of unspecified company executives to be added. Among those named in the document’s 56 pages are Pouyanné and five other TotalEnergies executives and employees. Favier, the company’s security chief, is not among them. TotalEnergies declined to make any of its executives or security managers available for interviews. In April 2024, when Pouyanné was questioned about his company’s Mozambique operation by the French Senate, he stated that while the government was responsible for the security of Cabo Delgado, “I can ensure the security of whichever industrial premises on which I might operate.” Asked about the container executions before the National Assembly this May, Pouyanné reaffirmed his faith in the Mozambican state, saying: “I think we help these countries progress if we trust their institutions and don’t spend our time lecturing them.” Apparently forgetting how he helped negotiate a security deal to place Mozambican soldiers on Total’s premises, however, he then qualified this statement, saying: “I can confirm that TotalEnergies has nothing to do with the Mozambican army.” A company spokesperson clarified this week: “TotalEnergies is not involved in the operations, command or conduct of the Mozambican armed forces.” In addition to the war crimes complaint, TotalEnergies’ Mozambique operation is already the subject of a criminal investigation opened in March by French state prosecutors. The allegation against the company is that it committed involuntary manslaughter by failing to protect or rescue workers left in Palma when ISIS carried out its massacre. Though POLITICO’s previous reporting found that 55 project workers were killed, TotalEnergies — through its subsidiary, Mozambique LNG — initially claimed it lost no one. “All the employees of Mozambique LNG, its contractors and subcontractors were safely evacuated from the Mozambique LNG Project site,” Maxime Rabilloud, Mozambique LNG’s managing director, told POLITICO last year. Advertisement That assertion notwithstanding, the death of at least one British subcontractor, Philip Mawer, is the subject of a formal inquest in the U.K.  In December 2024, the company’s Paris press office adjusted its position on the Palma attack. “TotalEnergies has never denied the tragedy that occurred in Palma and has always acknowledged the tragic loss of civilian lives,” it told POLITICO. For the first time, it also admitted “a small number” of project workers had been stationed outside its secure compound during the attack and exposed to the bloodbath.  A resolution to the French manslaughter investigation will take years. A decision on whether to open a formal investigation into the new claims against TotalEnergies for complicity in war crimes, let alone to bring the case to trial, is not expected until 2026, at the earliest. Should anyone eventually be tried for involuntary manslaughter, a conviction would carry a penalty of three years in prison and a €45,000 fine in France, escalating to five years and €75,000 for “a manifestly deliberate violation of a particular obligation of prudence or safety.” For complicity in war crimes, the sentence is five years to life. ‘CAN YOU ACTUALLY LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR?’ The war crimes accusation adds new uncertainty to the 20-year effort to develop Mozambique’s gas fields. In the aftermath of the 2021 Palma massacre, TotalEnergies declared a state of “force majeure,” a legal measure suspending all contracted work due to exceptional events. The following four and a half years of shutdown have cost TotalEnergies $4.5 billion, in addition to the $3.9 billion that Pouyanné originally paid Anadarko for the Mozambique operation. Billions more in costs can be expected before the plant finally pumps gas, which Total now predicts will happen in 2029. The manslaughter case and the war crimes complaint have the potential to cause further holdups by triggering due diligence obligations from TotalEnergies’ lenders, preventing them from delivering loans of $14.9 billion — without which Pouyanné has said his star project will collapse. Total also faces a Friends of the Earth legal challenge to a $4.7 billion U.S. government loan to the project. A TotalEnergies spokesperson said this week that the project was able to “meet due diligence requirements by lenders.” Advertisement All this comes as the situation on the ground remains unstable. After a successful Rwandan counter-attack from 2021 to 2023, the insurgency has returned, with the Islamists staging raids across Cabo Delgado, including Palma and the regional hub of Mocimboa da Praia. The International Organization for Migration says 112,185 people fled the violence between September 22 and October 13. Among those killed in the last few months were two gas project workers — a caterer, murdered in Palma, and a security guard, beheaded in a village south of town. TotalEnergies has consistently said that neither recent legal developments nor the upsurge in ISIS attacks will affect its plans to formally reopen its Mozambique operation by the end of the year. “This new complaint has no connection with the advancement of the Mozambique LNG project,” a spokesperson said this week. Pouyanné himself has spent much of this year insisting the project is “back on track” and its financing in place. In October, in a move to restart the project, the company lifted the force majeure.  Still, in a letter seen by POLITICO, Pouyanné also wrote to Mozambican President Daniel Chapo asking for 10 more years on its drilling license and $4.5 billion from the country to cover its cost overruns.  Mozambique, whose 2024 GDP was $22.42 billion — around a tenth of TotalEnergies’ revenues for the year of $195.61 billion — has yet to respond. A final issue for TotalEnergies’ CEO is whether a formal accusation of war crimes will fuel opposition to his leadership among shareholders. At 2024’s annual general meeting, a fifth of stockholders rejected the company’s climate transition strategy as too slow, and a quarter declined to support Pouyanné for a fourth three-year term. In 2025, several institutional investors expressed their opposition to Pouyanné by voting against his remuneration. In the statement, the TotalEnergies spokesperson pointed to the 2023 comments by Aschenbroich, the independent board member: “The Board unanimously looks forward to his continued leadership and his strategic vision to continue TotalEnergies’ transition.” Yet, there seems little prospect that his popularity will improve, inside or outside the company. “Patrick Pouyanné is everyone’s best enemy,” says Olivier Gantois, president of the French oil and gas lobby group UFIP-EM, “the scapegoat we love to beat up on.” Recently, the 62-year-old Pouyanné has begun to sound uncharacteristically plaintive. At TotalEnergies’ 2022 shareholder meeting, he grumbled that the dissidents might not like CO2 emissions, “but they sure like dividends.” At last year’s, he complained that TotalEnergies was in an impossible position. “We are trying to find a balance between today’s life and tomorrow’s,” he said. “It’s not because TotalEnergies stops producing hydrocarbons that demand for them will disappear.” Advertisement TotalEnergies’ articles of association require Pouyanné to retire before he reaches 67, in 2030, around the time that TotalEnergies currently forecasts gas production to begin in Mozambique. Henri Thulliez, the lawyer who filed both criminal complaints against TotalEnergies in Paris, predicts Pouyanné’s successors will be less attached to the project — for the simple reason that Mozambique turned out to be bad business. “You invest billions in the project, and the project has been completely suspended for four years now,” Thulliez says. “All your funders are hesitating. You’re facing two potential litigations in France, maybe at some point elsewhere, too. You have to ask: what’s the point of all of this?” As for Pouyanné, two questions will haunt his final years at TotalEnergies, he suggests. First, “Can shareholders afford to keep you in your job?” Second, “Can you actually look at yourself in the mirror?” Aude Le Gentil and Alexandre Léchenet contributed to this report.

BELÉM, Brazil — United Nations climate summits have for years ended with bold promises to stave off global warming. But those commitments often fade when nations go home. Three years ago, in a resort city on the Red Sea, delegates from nearly 200 countries approved what they hailed as a historic fund to help poorer nations pay for climate damages — but it’s at risk of running dry. A year later, negotiations a few miles from Dubai’s gleaming waterfront achieved the first-ever worldwide pledge to turn away from fossil fuels — but production of oil and natural gas is still rising, a trend championed by the new administration in Washington. That legacy is casting a shadow over this year’s conference near the mouth of the Amazon River, which the host, Brazil, has dubbed a summit of truth. Days after the gathering started last week, nations were still sorting out what to do with contentious issues that have typically held up the annual negotiations. As the talks opened, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the world must “fight” efforts to deny the reality of climate change — decades after scientists concluded that people are making the Earth hotter. That led one official to offer a grim assessment of global efforts to tackle climate change, 10 years after an earlier summit produced the sweeping Paris Agreement. “We have miserably failed to accomplish the objective of this convention, which is the stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s climate envoy and lead negotiator, during an interview at the conference site in Belém, Brazil. “Additional promises mean nothing if you didn’t achieve or fulfill your previous promises,” he added. It hasn’t helped that the U.S. is skipping the summit for the first time, or that President Donald Trump dismisses climate change as a hoax and urged the world to abandon efforts to fix it. But Trump isn’t the only reason for stalled action. Economic uncertainty, infighting and political backsliding have stymied green measures in both North America and Europe. In other parts of the world, countries are embracing the economic opportunities that the green transition offers. Many officials in Belém point to signs that progress is underway, including the rapid growth of renewables and electric vehicles and a broader understanding of both the world’s challenges and the means to address them. “Now we talk about solar panels, electric cars, regenerative agriculture, stopping deforestation, as if we have always talked about those things,” said Ana Toni, the summit’s executive director. “Just in one decade, the topic changed totally. But we still need to speed up the process.” Still, analysts say it’s become inevitable that the world’s warming will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius since the dawn of the industrial era, breaching the target at the heart of the Paris Agreement. With that in mind, countries are huddling at this month’s summit, known as COP30, with the hope of finding greater alignment on how to slow rising temperatures. But how credible would any promises reached in Brazil be? Here are five pledges achieved at past climate summits — and where they stand now: MOVING AWAY FROM FOSSIL FUELS The historic 2023 agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels, made at the COP28 talks in Dubai, was the first time that nearly 200 countries agreed to wind down their use of oil, natural gas and coal. Though nonbinding, that commitment was even more striking because the talks were overseen by the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil company. Just two years later, fossil fuel consumption is on the rise, despite rapid growth of wind and solar, and many of the world’s largest oil and gas producers plan to drill even more. The United States — the world’s biggest economy, top oil and gas producer and second-largest climate polluter — is pursuing a fossil fuel renaissance while forsaking plans to shift toward renewables. The president of the Dubai summit, Sultan al-Jaber, said at a recent energy conference that while wind and solar would expand, so too would oil and gas, in part to meet soaring demand for data centers. Liquefied natural gas would grow 65 percent by 2050, and oil will continue to be used as a feedstock for plastic, he said. “The exponential growth of AI is also creating a power surge that no one anticipated 18 months ago,” he said in a press release from the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., where he remains managing director and group CEO. The developed world is continuing to move in the wrong direction on fossil fuels, climate activists say. “We know that the world’s richest countries are continuing to invest in oil and gas development,” said Bill Hare, a climate scientist who founded Climate Analytics, a policy group. “This simply should not be happening.” The Paris-based International Energy Agency said last week that oil and gas demand could grow for decades to come. That statement marked a reversal from the group’s previous forecast that oil use would peak in 2030 as clean energy takes hold. Trump’s policies are one reason for the pivot. Still, renewables such as wind and solar power are soaring in many countries, leading analysts to believe that nations will continue to shift away from fossil fuels. How quickly that will happen is unknown. “The transition is underway but not yet at the pace or scale required,” said a U.N. report on global climate action released last week. It pointed to large gaps in efforts to reduce fossil fuel subsidies and abate methane pollution. Lula opened this year’s climate conference by calling for a “road map” to cut fossil fuels globally. It has earned support from countries such as Colombia, Germany, Kenya and the United Kingdom. But it’s not part of the official agenda at these talks, and many poorer countries say what they really need is funding and support to make the shift. TRIPLE RENEWABLE ENERGY, DOUBLE ENERGY EFFICIENCY This call also emerged from the 2023 summit, and was considered a tangible measure of countries’ progress toward achieving the Paris Agreement’s temperature targets. Countries are on track to meet the pledge to triple their renewable energy capacity by 2030, thanks largely to a record surge in solar power, according to energy think tank Ember. It estimates that the world is set to add around 793 gigawatts of new renewable capacity in 2025, up from 717 gigawatts in 2024, driven mainly by China. “If this pace continues, annual additions now only need to grow by around 12 percent a year from 2026 to 2030 to reach tripling, compared with 21 percent originally needed,” said Dave Jones, Ember’s chief analyst. “But governments will need to strengthen commitments to lock this in.” The pledge to double the world’s energy efficiency by 2030, by contrast, is a long way behind. While efficiency improvements would need to grow by 4 percent a year to reach that target, they hit only 1 percent in 2024. ‘LOSS AND DAMAGE’ FUND When the landmark fund for victims of climate disasters was established at the 2022 talks in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, it offered promise that billions of dollars would someday flow to nations slammed by hurricanes, droughts or rising seas. Three years later, it has less than $800 million — only a little more than it had in 2023. Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, excoriated leaders this month for not providing more. Her rebuke came little more than a week after Hurricane Melissa, one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever seen in the Atlantic, swept across the Caribbean. “All of us should hold our heads down in shame, because having established this fund a few years ago in Sharm El-Sheikh, its capital base is still under $800 million while Jamaica reels from damage in excess of $7 billion, not to mention Cuba or the Bahamas,” she said. Last week, the fund announced it was allocating $250 million for financial requests to help less-wealthy nations grapple with “damage from slow onset and extreme climate-induced events.” The fund’s executive director, Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, said the call for contributions was significant but also a reminder that the fund needs much more money. Richard Muyungi, chair for the African Group of Negotiators and Tanzania’s climate envoy, said he expects additional funds will come from this summit, though not the billions needed. “There is a chance that the fund will run out of money by next year, year after next, before it even is given a chance to replenish itself,” said Michai Robertson, a senior finance adviser for the Alliance of Small Island States. GLOBAL METHANE PLEDGE Backed by the U.S. and European Union, this pledge to cut global methane emissions 30 percent by 2030 was launched four years ago at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, sparking a wave of talk about the benefits of cutting methane, a greenhouse gas with a relatively short shelf life but much greater warming potential than carbon dioxide. “The Global Methane Pledge has been instrumental in catalyzing attention to the issue of methane, because it has moved from a niche issue to one of the critical elements of the climate planning discussions,” said Giulia Ferrini, head of the U.N. Environment Program’s International Methane Emissions Observatory. “All the tools are there,” she added. “It’s just a question of political will.” Methane emissions from the oil and gas sector remain stubbornly high, despite the economic benefits of bringing them down, according to the IEA. The group’s latest methane tracker shows that energy-based methane pollution was around 120 million tons in 2024, roughly the same as a year earlier. Despite more than 150 nations joining the Global Methane Pledge, few countries or companies have devised plans to meet their commitments, “and even fewer have demonstrated verifiable emissions reductions,” the IEA said. The European Union’s methane regulation requires all oil and gas operators to measure, report and verify their emissions, including importers. And countries and companies are becoming more diligent about complying with an international satellite program that notifies companies and countries of methane leaks so they can repair them. Responses went from just 1 percent of alerts last year to 12 percent so far in 2025. More work is needed to achieve the 2030 goal, the U.N. says. Meanwhile, U.S. officials have pressured the EU to rethink its methane curbs. Barbados and several other countries are calling for a binding methane pact similar to the Montreal Protocol, the 1987 agreement that’s widely credited with saving the ozone layer by phasing out the use of harmful pollutants. That’s something Paris Agreement architect Laurence Tubiana hopes could happen. “I’m just in favor of tackling this very seriously, because the pledge doesn’t work [well] enough,” she said. CLIMATE FINANCE In 2009, wealthy countries agreed to provide $100 billion annually until 2025 to help poorer nations deal with rising temperatures. At last year’s climate talks in Azerbaijan, they upped the ante to $300 billion per year by 2035. But those countries delivered the $100 billion two years late, and many nations viewed the new $300 billion commitment with disappointment. India, which expressed particular ire about last year’s outcome, is pushing for new discussions in Brazil to get that money flowing. “Finance really is at the core of everything that we do,” Ali Mohamed, Kenya’s climate envoy, told POLITICO’s E&E News. But he also recognizes that governments alone are not the answer. “We cannot say finance must only come from the public sector.” Last year’s pledge included a call for companies and multilateral development banks to contribute a sum exceeding $1 trillion by 2035, but much of that would be juiced by donor nations — and more countries would need to contribute. That is more important now, said Jake Werksman, the EU’s lead negotiator. “As you know, one of the larger contributors to this process, the U.S., has essentially shut down all development flows from the U.S. budget, and no other party, including the EU, can make up for that gap,” he said during a press conference. Zack Colman and Zia Weise contributed to this report from Belém, Brazil.

LONDON — A final decision on how to repair Britain’s crumbling parliament is likely to be postponed beyond the next general election, according to four people familiar with the matter. MPs were expected to vote by the end of 2025 on four options for restoring the 19th-century Palace of Westminster — a long-delayed process that has been under discussion for more than a decade as problems with the building mount. But under new plans drawn up by officials following a recent board meeting overseeing the restoration process, the selection of a final option will be significantly delayed. Instead, MPs are likely to be offered a vote early next year on starting “preparatory works” such as procurement processes and building surveys. The decision on which final option to proceed with would not be required until at least 2030, two of the people said.  It is a serious blow to hopes that the historic palace will be gutted and restored in the near future to avoid a similar disaster to the fire that consumed Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019.  BACKLASH FEARS So far, planning has revolved around multiple options, including “full decant,” where all MPs move to another building; a less-extensive “partial decant”; or a rolling program of “enhanced maintenance and improvement” (EMI) works without leaving the building. However, those familiar with discussions now expect the options to be narrowed down to just two: full decant, or a plan described as “EMI-plus.” Successive governments have put off a decision on renovating parliament amid fears of a public backlash over the enormous cost. It was estimated at between £7 billion and £13 billion in 2022, but has since risen. Two of the people familiar with discussions — granted anonymity to discuss them frankly — stressed that narrowing down to two options and approving preparatory works would still represent substantial progress. It comes at a time when the British government is facing painful economic choices in its Nov. 26 budget. The same person stressed that the new course of action was yet to be fully agreed with the U.K. Treasury. A third person familiar with the discussions said that while starting preparatory works would be a step in the right direction, the vote had been “fudged” for the reason that “it’s a scary big figure at a time when the government is taking unpalatable decisions and there’s no appetite to put it to MPs.” Ministers have been anxious to avoid the budget being juxtaposed with the spectacle of MPs debating multibillion sums for the future of their own workplace. Two of the people said they expect parliamentary authorities to publish the cost of the options for restoration, as well as the cost of delay, shortly before the budget. The costs of ad hoc maintenance and repairs to keep the palace safe have been rising. Fresh figures obtained by POLITICO show it now stands at £1.56 million a week, or £81.1 million a year, up from £1.45 million a week in 2023. Alexandra Meakin, an expert on restoration from the University of Sheffield, said: “The continued failure to give the current parliament a full debate and vote means taxpayers are continuing to spend millions of pounds each year on repairs and maintenance, while the risk of the building being destroyed in a catastrophic flood or fire remains unaddressed.” ‘WE REMAIN ON TRACK’ Corridors in the palace’s sprawling basement that could once fit four people abreast are now so packed with gas lines, water pipes, electrical wiring and redundant infrastructure that workers can only walk down them single file. It has a misting system to mitigate the risk of fire. Extra safety measures have been introduced in recent years to guard against falling masonry that has come loose on several occasions. A government spokesperson said: “The Restoration and Renewal Programme has always been a parliamentary programme and remains so. Ensuring value for taxpayers’ money must be a driving focus.” A U.K. parliament spokesperson said: “We remain on track to bring costed proposals for the restoration of the Palace of Westminster to both Houses this year, detailing costs, timescales, risks and benefits of the delivery options, all of which represent a significant, multibillion pound investment in the Palace.”

La revisione della direttiva Ue sulle accise energetiche è sempre più vicina allo stallo. A certificare che non esiste un terreno comune tra i Ventisette è la stessa presidenza di turno danese. “Abbiamo lavorato duramente per trovare un compromesso”, ha ammesso la ministra dell’Economia Stephanie Lose, “ma se ci muoviamo in direzione di alcuni Paesi ne perdiamo altri. È difficile vedere un modo per andare avanti”. Tra i contrari anche l’Italia: “Le aliquote minime proposte per il gas naturale sono ancora elevate” e il gas naturale in Italia “è ampiamente utilizzato in settori industriali a rischio di delocalizzazione”, ha sintetizzato nella sessione pubblica dell’Ecofin il ministro dell’Economia Giancarlo Giorgetti. La riforma, proposta dalla Commissione nel 2021, puntava a riscrivere il sistema delle accise sui prodotti energetici per renderlo coerente con gli obiettivi climatici europei: favorire il passaggio a carburanti più sostenibili, ridurre gli incentivi all’uso dei combustibili fossili e applicare in modo più rigoroso il principio “chi inquina paga”. Il cuore dell’intervento è il superamento dell’attuale tassazione basata sul volume del prodotto e l’introduzione di un criterio che tenga conto del contenuto energetico e dell’impatto ambientale dei diversi combustibili. Un impianto nato prima che la guerra in Ucraina mandasse alle stelle i prezzi del gas e stravolgesse la geopolitica dell’energia. Motivo per cui oggi, per molti Stati, il percorso di transizione può attendere. L’Italia è tra questi. Giorgetti ha ribadito che “risente in modo significativo degli elevati prezzi dell’energia, in particolare del gas naturale”, aggravati dalla fine delle forniture russe, e ha chiesto una soluzione “ragionevole” che tenga conto delle peculiarità del sistema industriale italiano. Per Giorgetti, “le aliquote minime proposte per il gas naturale sono ancora elevate” e la sostituzione nel breve periodo con carburanti meno inquinanti “non è realistica“. Un altro nodo è la fine della possibilità di differenziare le accise sul gasolio tra trasporto commerciale e privato: “Considerate le particolarità geografiche italiane, riteniamo che il venir meno della differenziazione debba essere condizionato a una valutazione della Commissione sulla disponibilità di carburanti più sostenibili e sull’impatto sul mercato interno”, ha insistito il ministro, pur favorevole all’ipotesi di un periodo transitorio e di una clausola di revisione. La direttiva sulle accise per essere approvata richiede l’unanimità. La presidenza danese già avverte che non ci sarà alcun accordo a novembre: il fascicolo slitterà almeno a dicembre. L'articolo In stallo la riforma Ue della tassazione dell’energia per ridurre l’uso di combustibili fossili. Italia contraria proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.

BRUSSELS — A weeks-long stalemate holding up the latest package of sanctions against Russia was ended Wednesday night after Slovakia lifted its veto, the Danish presidency of the Council of the EU confirmed. The bulk of the package — the 19th to be imposed on Moscow since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago — focuses on sapping the Kremlin’s war chest by imposing restrictions on energy traders and financial institutions, many of them in third countries. Companies helping the Russian war effort will be targeted, in addition to 117 new tankers considered to be part of the shadow fleet that ships Russian fossil fuels in violation of the oil price cap. Earlier this week, energy ministers from 27 member countries agreed by qualified majority to a landmark phaseout of Russian gas, against the objections of Slovakia and Hungary. Slovakia had vowed to hold up the sanctions package unless it was given assurances on how to combat high energy prices and aid heavy industries like car making. Austria and Hungary had also expressed concerns over the sanctions package but lifted their veto in recent days. Slovakia was the last country blocking the new restrictions — and had sought concessions in the statement to be agreed at Thursday’s summit of EU leaders in Brussels. “All our demands … were included [in the statement],” a Slovak diplomat confirmed to POLITICO. The summit will seek to stress the EU’s support of Ukraine, in light of U.S. President Donald Trump’s pressure on Kyiv to cede territory to Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to join parts of the meeting in Brussels. Leaders are expected to emphasize the need to further hit Moscow with hefty sanctions over its war against Ukraine. Defense spending as well as the use of frozen Russian assets to support Kyiv are all on the agenda. The sanctions package will also significantly expand the number of non-Russian companies banned from doing business with the bloc in a bid to prevent Moscow from circumventing the restrictions. Defense spending as well as the use of frozen Russian assets to support Kyiv are all on the agenda. | Sergey Shestak/EPA Specifically, the bloc seeks to add export controls on another 45 companies that are deemed to be working together to evade sanctions. Those include 12 Chinese, two Thai and three Indian entities that have enabled Russia to circumvent the bloc’s sanctions. The package also restricts the movement of Russian diplomats within the EU. They will have to notify other EU governments of their movements before crossing the border of their host country. The package will now go through a so-called written procedure, where capitals have until Thursday morning to speak up. If no one does, the text is approved.

KYIV — Russian forces unleashed a new bombardment on Ukrainian gas infrastructure, which is crucial for the country’s heating and electricity supply ahead of winter. The Kremlin attacked Ukrainian gas extraction grounds in the Kharkiv, Sumy, and Chernihiv regions three times in the last seven days, with a gas thermal power plant overnight being the latest target, Ukrainian state gas company Naftogaz said in a statement Wednesday. “These objects have no relation to the military. Russian terrorists are committing another act of terrorism, aiming to deprive Ukraine of gas, heat, and electricity in the winter,” said Sergii Koretskyi, chairman of the Naftogaz board. “The Russians cannot understand that we cannot be broken and intimidated like this. We support and protect each other. We will restore everything. We will rebuild everything,” Koretskyi added. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian gas infrastructure is under heavy pressure from the Kremlin — but he has a plan. “We have Plan A and Plan B. Under Plan B, if there is, for example, a strong attack on all gas infrastructure, we understand that we have imports then,” Zelenskyy told several journalists in Kyiv last week, providing no further details. “We know the volume and cost of the necessary imports — this is Plan B. Plan A is when we rely more on our own production. In Plan B, we also know where to find the money required,” he added. The Oct. 3 strikes on Poltava and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s main gas extraction regions, knocked out some 60 percent of Ukraine’s domestic gas production, Bloomberg reported last week. Naftogaz reported that it was the largest strike on gas infrastructure since the start of the full-scale invasion — including more than 35 missiles and 60 killer drones. The strike likely forced Kyiv to search for an additional €1.9 billion in urgent gas imports.