The top 100 most costly EU regulations

Open Europe has today published a list of the top 100 most costly EU regulations, detailing the annual cost of the laws, the cumulative cost of them by 2020, and the article base in the Lisbon Treaty for each regulation . We estimate that these laws will in total cost the UK economy a staggering £184 billion by 2020. To put that figure in context: for the same amount, the UK Government could abolish the country’s entire budget deficit and still leave the Exchequer with some £6 bn. All cost estimates are based on the UK Government’s own impact assessments so the figures are instructive.

The top four items on the list account for almost £97 billion - or 53% - of the total cost of the 100 regulations by 2020. Looking at these four laws clearly illustrates the enormous, and often overlooked, potential for the UK economy to save money by making a few key regulations less burdensome. Notably, cutting down the costs of these regulations could happen without any of the stated benefits being lost in the process.

1) The Working Time Directive, to cost the UK economy £32.8 bn by 2020: This Directive has been widely criticised for being overprescriptive, impractical and generally out of touch with reality - particularly as it applies to the NHS. Merely changing the on-call time and compensatory rest rules entailed in the WTD could save the UK’s public sector millions - if not billions - of punds every year.

2) The EU’s Climate Action and Renewable Energy Package, to cost the UK economy £28.2 bn by 2020: As we’ve argued before, the EU could find a much more cost-effective way to achieve carbon emission reduction by setting overall targets, and then allowing for individual member states to decide for themselves how best to reach them (as opposed to the current micromanaging approach). This would hurt the economy less and provide a more credible alternative to follow for countries outside Europe.

3) Energy Perfomance Certificates for buildings, a.k.a Home Information Packs, to cost the UK economy £20.2 bn by 2020. Again, this cannot possibly be described as the most cost-effective way to achieve reductions in carbon emissions from the residential sector.

4) The Temporary Agencey Workers Directive, to be implemented in 2011 and set to cost the UK economy £15.6 bn by 2020: When he was Business Secretary, John Hutton warned that this Directive could consign “literally thousands of people to benefit dependency” (this was in 2007, before Gordon Brown was outnegotiated in a horsetrading deal involving the UK’s opt-out from the EU’s 48 hour working week. The Government is now trying to defend the Directive).

Making these laws less burdensome or tailor them to better fit the UK is not easy - but it certainly isn’t impossible. Neither is avoiding repeats of these laws. But this does require a far tougher and smarter approach to EU regulations/negotiations than that employed by the current government. See here for our ideas on what such an approach should entail (chapter 5).

An excellent place to start would be for an incoming UK government to opt out altogether from the articles in the EU treaties which give rise to EU’s social legislation (articles 151 to 161 as amended by the Lisbon Treaty). With correspondng domestic reforms, this could instantly reduce much of the cost stemming from, for instance, the Working Time Directive and the Temporary Workers Directive.

At a time when every penny is needed to close a massive public deficit, surely cutting the cost of regulation should be a top priority for the next government?

UN probing allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation in Côte d’Ivoire

The United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) has announced that it is taking all possible measures to investigate allegations that have emerged of sexual abuse and exploitation among its military personnel, some dating back to 2006 and potentially involving minors.

Genome firm shoots itself in the foot

DeCode Genetics needs to drum up business, but its latest efforts haven’t gone well, says Peter Aldhous

Ugandan rebels murder, rape, mutilate, displace thousands in DR Congo, Sudan - UN

In a 10-month rampage of killings, rape and mutilation in neighbouring countries that may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, the rebel Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has killed some 1,300 civilians, abducted 1,400 more, including hundreds of children and women, and displaced nearly 300,000 others, the United Nations reported today.

ElBaradei rattles official Egypt by mulling presidential run

CAIRO – Once upon a time, Mohamed ElBaradei was Egypt’s favorite son. He was extolled in the media as his achievements mounted.

The nation looked on proudly as he was elected three times to the post of director general of the powerful International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), admired his courage when he publicly disputed the U.S. rationale behind the invasion of Iraq, and applauded his success as a national victory when he and the IAEA won the Nobel Peace Prize for striving to prevent the spread of nuclear energy for military use. In recognition, he was awarded the highest accolade in Egypt, the Nile Medal.

Caren Firouz / Reuters file

Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the IAEA, speaks during an agency press conference in Tehran on Oct. 4, 2009.

But once he stepped down from the IAEA and stated publicly he would be willing to run for president in Egypt’s 2011 election, a position held by President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak for the past 28 years, his most vocal supporters began a campaign of vilification. 

…(read more)

Australian government plans internet censorship

Anyone accessing the web in Australia could soon find their data passing through government filters first

Climate change blamed for Great Lakes decline

Canadian-U.S. study attributes discernible drop in water levels in Huron and Michigan to drier weather.

The water levels of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan have been falling steadily compared with those on Lake Erie, and no one knew why.

But a major report financed by the U.S. and Canadian governments suggests an answer: The fingerprints of climate change are starting to be found in the Great Lakes, the world’s largest body of fresh water, causing a discernible drop in their levels.

The report, released Tuesday December 15th, estimated that Lake Huron and Lake Michigan have fallen about a quarter metre relative to Lake Erie since the early 1960s, with 40 to 74 per cent of the reduction due to recent changes in precipitation patterns and temperatures.

The alteration in climate is “the most significant factor” in the water level drop and “could be a more substantive issue for the future on the Great Lakes,” said Ted Yuzyk, Canadian co-chair of the International Upper Great Lakes Study Board, which compiled the report.

Previous studies have projected a decline in the amount of water in the Great Lakes due to climate change, but the board is the first to suggest the trend is already happening.

The fall in water levels is attributed to such factors as less precipitation and the persistent, long-term decline in the lakes’ ice cover each winter.

The report said generally drier weather and drought-like conditions from 1998 to 2008 in the central part of North America led to a drop of about 20 per cent in the quantity of water flowing into Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, compared with the average since 1948.

The two lakes depend on precipitation and run-off for about three-quarters of their inflow. The other quarter comes from Lake Superior, whose outflow can be partly regulated. Lake Erie, by contrast, receives nearly 80 per cent of its supplies from Lake Huron, so it hasn’t been influenced as dramatically by the reduction in precipitation.

The finding that climate change is already undermining the Great Lakes is politically sensitive. The board has written to the Canadian and U.S. governments to see whether it is within its mandate to study ways to hold back some of the water in Lakes Huron and Michigan to maintain their size in the face of global warming. Mr. Yuzyk said the clarification is still being assessed.

The board was assembled by the International Joint Commission, a bi-national U.S. and Canadian organization that monitors boundary waters the two countries share.

The concerns about Lake Huron and Lake Michigan levels arose in 2005, when a Canadian environmental organization, Georgian Bay Forever, said levels were diminishing because dredging of the St. Clair River in the 1960s allowed more water to drain from the lakes. The river, which runs by the Ontario community of Sarnia, drains the two lakes and ultimately flows into Lake Erie, leading to worries that the Great Lakes had sprung a leak.

But the report said that while the riverbed experienced some erosion in the 1980s, it now appears to be stable. In addition, it said a small part of the observed water level changes were due to the way land around the Great Lakes is rebounding from the melting of glaciers that covered the area during the last ice age.

While most of the world’s attention on disappearing ice has focused on the Arctic, the trend is also happening on the Great Lakes. The report said that in the past 36 winters, three of the four smallest ice covers on Lakes Huron, Michigan, Erie and Superior occurred from 1998 to 2008.

Less ice leads to increased heat input from sunlight, higher winds around the water and more evaporation, contributing to lower water levels.

The report involved more than 100 scientists and engineers and a budget estimated at $4-million.

Source:
The Globe and Mail, “Climate change blamed for Great Lakes decline“, accessed December 16, 2009

The road from Copenhagen - Ed Miliband

The talks were chaotic, at times farcical. But in the accord there were real gains we can build upon

Ed Miliband
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 December 2009 20.30 GMT
Where do we go from here? That is the question we are all asking ourselves after Copenhagen. We have to begin by understanding the lessons of what went wrong but also recognise the achievements that it secured.
This was a chaotic process dogged by procedural games. Thirty leaders left their negotiators at 3am on Friday, the last night to haggle over the short Danish text that became the accord. To get a deal we needed urgent progress because time was running out. Five hours later, we had got to the third paragraph.
The procedural wrangling was, in fact, a cover for points of serious, substantive disagreement. The vast majority of countries, developed and developing, believe that we will only construct a lasting accord that protects the planet if all countries’ commitments or actions are legally binding. But some leading developing countries currently refuse to countenance this. That is why we did not secure an agreement that the political accord struck in Copenhagen should lead to a legally binding outcome.
We did not get an agreement on 50% reductions in global emissions by 2050 or on 80% reductions by developed countries. Both were vetoed by China, despite the support of a coalition of developed and the vast majority of developing countries. Indeed, this is one of the straws in the wind for the future: the old order of developed versus developing has been replaced by more interesting alliances.
Would it have been better to refuse to sign and walk away? No. Of course it was right to consider whether we should sign. But to have vetoed the agreement would have meant walking away from the progress made in the last year and the real outcomes that are part of this accord, including finance for poor countries. Some of the strongest voices urging that we agree the accord were countries like the Maldives and Ethiopia.
Countries signing the accord have endorsed the science that says we must prevent warming of more than 2C. For the first time developing countries, including China, as well as developed countries have agreed emissions commitments for the next decade. If countries deliver on the most ambitious targets, we will be within striking distance of what is needed to prevent warming of more than 2C. These commitments will also for the first time be listed and independently scrutinised, with reports to the UN required every two years.
We have also established an unprecedented commitment among rich countries to finance the response to climate change: $10bn a year over the next three years – starting to flow now – rising to $100bn a year by 2020, the goal first set out by the prime minister in June.
In the months ahead, these concrete achievements must be secured and extended. We must work to ensure that developed nations in particular, such as Australia, Japan and the EU nations, deliver on the highest possible emissions cuts. And as the US Senate considers its legislation, it is important it delivers not just the 17% reductions offered so far but the deepest possible.
Finance for poor countries must flow straight away, which the decision agreed last Saturday enables us to do. We must also agree new ways to raise revenue to meet these commitments, which the working group established by the accord will propose.
We should also mobilise all the countries that want a legal treaty to campaign for it. The voice of small island states and African countries were the most resonant at these talks. For their people, most vulnerable to climate change, they know we must have a legal framework. Together we will make clear to those countries holding out against a binding legal treaty that we will not allow them to block global progress.
There is a wider question, too, about the structures and nature of the negotiations. The last two weeks at times have presented a farcical picture to the public. We cannot again allow negotiations on real points of substance to be hijacked in this way. We will need to have major reform of the UN body overseeing the negotiations and of the way the negotiations are conducted.
The challenge for all of us is not to lose heart and momentum. The truth is that the global campaign, co-ordinated by green NGOs, backed by business and supported by a wider cross section of the public, has achieved a lot. We would never have had targets from so many countries, the engagement of leaders, and the agreement on finance without this sort of mobilisation.
My fear that Copenhagen would pass people by without comment turned out to be unfounded. But the lesson of Make Poverty History is that we must keep this campaign going and build on it. It needs to be more of a genuinely global mobilisation, taking in all countries.
Today many people will be feeling gloomy about the results of their efforts. But no campaign ever wholly succeeds at the first time of asking. We should take heart from the achievements and step up our efforts. The road from Copenhagen will have as many obstacles as the road to it. But this year has proved what can be done, as well as the scale of the challenge we face.

A great step forward: Obama’s verdict on climate change pact

President’s intervention was failure, say critics
Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 December 2009 20.49 GMT
Barack Obama returned to a snowbound Washington at the weekend clutching a deal that was cast as a step forward by his administration but decried as a waste of paper by critics on both sides of the climate change debate.
At the end of another of his interventions on the world stage that are becoming a hallmark of his presidency, Obama said the Copenhagen talks amounted to an “important breakthrough” and they had laid the foundation for international action “in the years to come”.
But he also accepted it was a partial victory, saying the pact was “not enough”, the road ahead would be hard and there was a long way still to go.
David Axelrod, his chief adviser, took to the airwaves this morning to defend the outcome of the 31-hour negotiations in similar vein: it was not perfect but it was a start. “Nobody says that this is the end of the road,” Axelrod told CNN. “The end of the road would have been the complete collapse of those talks. This is a great step forward.”
Politico, a Washington-based political news website, said the agreement was “more notable for what it doesn’t accomplish than what it does, an inconvenient truth Obama ruefully acknowledged”.
The last time Obama imposed himself into a gathering of world leaders in Copenhagen in October, when he lent his weight to Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, it ended in humiliation. This time the outcome was not so ignominious, and the administration could and did claim credit for some, albeit non-binding, results.
Critics were quick to disparage Obama’s achievement as a meaningless compromise. Friends of the Earth US dismissed the agreement as a sham. “This is not a strong deal or a just one – it isn’t even a real one,” said the group’s president Erich Pica. He blamed the US for the absence of concrete results saying it was the main polluter behind the climate crisis yet it had failed to put enough money on the table to help poor countries cope with its consequences.
On the other side of the debate, Club for Growth, a campaign for small government and low taxes, hailed the agreement as an ironic triumph. Its head, Chris Chocola, said a binding deal would have destroyed 30 million American jobs, but he was relieved when Obama described it as a meaningful pact. “When politicians call something ‘meaningful’, that means it isn’t,” Chocola said.
The question for the White House now is how the Copenhagen agreement will affect its ambitions to present Congress with a wide ranging energy bill that would enshrine a cap-and-trade system for reducing emissions through bartering. Opponents of cap-and-trade, such as the Club for Growth, are likely to be emboldened in their efforts to frustrate the administration, pointing to the absence of a firm commitment internationally to set emissions reduction targets. Against that, the White House will argue there is enough of a global mandate to merit pressing ahead with its legislative plans.
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said it was time for America to move quickly to develop a unilateral strategy in which the Senate would pass an energy bill setting a long-term price on carbon “that will really stimulate America to become the world leader in clean-tech. If we lead by example, more people will follow us by emulation than by compulsion of some UN treaty.”
In an editorial, the Washington Post saw grounds for limited optimism that the Senate would act. It said that the Copenhagen agreement was weak and inadequate, but “this outcome, however imperfect, should prod the US Senate to take up climate-change legislation. Even if China hadn’t moved, reducing America’s dependence on foreign sources of energy and tacking domestic pollution are strong enough reasons to pass a bill.”
The Post also noted that Copenhagen had given a glimpse of a new world order in which the US and China would increasingly shape international diplomacy. This so-called G2 of the world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases had the fate of any climate change treaty in its hands.

Has peak theory reached its tipping point?

We have all heard of peak oil? But now there is peak wood. And peak gold. And even peak rock music . . .

David Adam
The Guardian, Monday 21 December 2009
First there was peak oil. Then came peak wood and peak gas. What is it with all these peaks ? Is the world really running out of the raw materials it needs to make it tick, move and communicate? Or should the next peak be in stories about peaks?
Attributed to American geophysicist M King Hubbert, peak theory assumes that resource production follows a bell-shaped curve. Early on, the production rate increases as discoveries are made and infrastructure built. Later in the curve, after the eponymous Hubbert’s peak, production declines as reserves run dry. US oil production reached its Hubbert’s peak in the early 70s and has declined since. But what about the rest?
Peak coal Coal started the whole peak theory craze when Hubbert used records of how its production levelled off to forecast future peaks in US oil supply. Conventional thinking says there are hundreds of years of coal supplies left, but are the figures accurate? Predictions are complicated by there being several types of coal, with much of the high-grade stuff already burnt. Although production keeps rising, the total energy obtained may peak sooner.
Peak oil and gas Every schoolchild is taught that world supplies will eventually run out. But when? Supporters and critics of global peak oil theory argue about the timing of the peak, with some insisting it has already been reached. Reliable, independent estimates of discoveries and production are rare, and most governments rely on statistics from the International Energy Agency, which has long been accused of painting too rosy a picture.
Peak gold Earlier this month, Aaron Regent, president of the Canadian gold company Barrick Gold, reportedly warned there was a strong case that the world was already at peak gold. Global output has fallen steadily since 2000 and, Regent said, it was becoming harder and harder to find ore.
Peak water There is a serious academic school of thought that says the Earth’s water was delivered from outer space on the back of wet asteroids and comets. But there is growing concern that the water is running dry. As Alex Bell describes in his book Peak Water, we are using more water than is available in the places where we live. For some, in the wet regions, peak water will never occur, but for the people of the US, Africa, southern Europe, India, Middle East and China, he says, it is already here.
Peak wood At an energy conference in Abu Dhabi earlier this year, the Dutch Crown Prince Willem-Alexander warned that we should learn a lesson from history. When the Roman empire collapsed, he said, large parts of Europe had been deforested for farmland and to provide firewood. “Wood and food were essential to maintain the Roman empire,” he said. “So the demise of a seemingly invincible civilisation was partially due to the unsustainable use of their prime energy resource. What the Romans were experiencing, we would now describe as peak wood.”
Peak rock music Most of the good musical ideas really have been used up. Last year, popular culture blog Overthinking It analysed Rolling Stone magazine’s top 500 songs of all time, and found that rock music peaked in the late 1960s. “It would seem that, like oil, the supply of great musical ideas is finite. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the Motown greats and other genre innovators quickly extracted the best their respective genres had to offer, leaving little supply for future musicians.”