Category: Politico News

BELFAST — British and European negotiators are working to agree “a way forward” on post-Brexit trade arrangements that will give Britain enough political cover to avoid snap elections in Northern Ireland, Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said Wednesday. Speaking after he met four of the five main parties in Northern Ireland’s crippled legislature, Coveney suggested […]

Spain has begun the process of withdrawing from the Energy Charter Treaty, its minister for the ecological transition said today. Teresa Ribera told POLITICO that a process to reduce the pact’s protections for fossil fuel projects had brought “no improvements.” The 1994 treaty was designed to protect investments in energy infrastructure in post-Soviet countries. It […]

The European Commission on Wednesday recommended naming Bosnia and Herzegovina as an official EU candidate if several conditions are met — a key step in the long process of joining the bloc. The move is a major milestone for Bosnia and Herzegovina, which applied for EU membership in 2016. And it comes amid a renewed push to […]

WASHINGTON — The post-Cold War era is “definitively over,” the Biden administration declared in a new U.S. national security strategy, describing its intention to compete ferociously against China and Russia — while also collaborating with them on global threats like climate change. The long-awaited National Security Strategy, delayed by the invasion of Ukraine, serves as […]

The European Commission will set out a new package of legislative interventions to ease the impact of the energy crisis on October 18, including joint purchasing of gas by 2023. Speaking following an informal meeting of EU energy ministers in Prague, Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson said the plans would avoid a scenario where member countries […]

Teresa Ribera saw this coming. In four years as minister for the ecological transition — she later added deputy prime minister to her titles — she has guided Spain’s shift away from coal, crafted a pandemic recovery plan that is among the greenest in Europe and ensured Spain has emerged as a relative winner compared […]

It took a war criminal to speed up Europe’s green revolution. By invading Ukraine and manipulating energy supplies to undermine European support for Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved something generations of green campaigners could not — clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security. The political response from the EU was […]

It’s taken decades for the EU to get serious about its transport emissions problem. That it’s now doing so is in no small part due to William Todts and his team at Transport & Environment. Todts might not be well known outside Brussels’ European Quarter, but when it comes to moving the needle on the […]

By launching a bloody invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has done more than almost any other single human being to speed up the end of the fossil fuel era. Immediately after the February 24 invasion, EU countries rushed to cut their dependence on imports of Russian coal, oil and gas, replacing them with gas from […]

Mette Frederiksen didn’t set out to become one of the world’s greenest leaders. After the 2019 election, her Social Democrats needed green and radical left parties to govern. That, and the Danish public’s huge desire for the country to be a leader on climate change, pushed Frederiksen further than she was naturally inclined to go. […]