Europe’s incredible shrinking environmental commitment

In a sense it is not at all surprising that Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker would nominate Malta’s Karmenu Vella for an enlarged portfolio that has responsibility for the environment, fisheries and maritime policy.

Hang on, did I say ‘enlarged’? Well, I could just as easily have said ‘diminished’. Because prior to Juncker’s proposals for a new Commission, ‘The Environment’ used to be a single portfolio handled by a single Commissioner… as Malta knows only too well, seeing as it was former Environment Commissioners such as Stavros Dimas who had initiated infringement procedures against us over spring hunting… and, until recently, threatened similar actions over the Marsa power station, as well as our 100% reliance on fossil fuels, among other environmental concerns.

In fact, until this week ‘The Environment’ was among the very few areas where Malta still struggled to fully implement European directives. And previous Commission presidents used to take this collective failure on our part rather seriously: sending ‘reasoned opinions’ about our unreasonable insistence on permitting European birds to be killed during the breeding season, for instance; or our imminent failure to meet the EU’s climate change targets by 2020.

I need hardly add that this sort of scrutiny and enforcement was one of the more compelling reasons we had been given to vote ‘yes’ to EU membership in 2003. Yet since that time, we have seen the Commission approve an upward revision of our national emissions levels; waves upon waves of unbridled construction and development (to which end the development zones were increased, again with the blessing of the Commission); the reintroduction of trapping of wild birds, in direct defiance of European law; spring hunting being practically sanctioned by the EU… not to mention the teeny-weeny detail that both Labour and Nationalist governments have simply carried on their disgraceful policy of always caving in to powerful lobbies such as the illegal Armier boathouse village, etc.

I have tried in recent years to square this up with all the promises of better environmental protection we had heard before joining the EU. I haven’t managed so far… and it looks like Juncker’s plans for the new Commission will only make the same job harder.

This brings me to the first of several aberrations in our 20-odd-year-old, dysfunctional relationship with the European Union. Despite the seriousness of the changes we are all about to witness, the only questions being asked locally about the new Commission concern the suitability or otherwise of Karmenu Vella for the post… given his ties with the Maltese business, tourism and construction sectors, and so on.

I won’t say these concerns are misplaced or in any way illegitimate; but for crying out loud. What we are witnessing here is the possible dismantlement of the EU’s entire environmental protection regime – which in Malta’s case never really added up to much protection anyway. Yet all we seem capable of talking about is whether Karmenu Vella will be given a ‘tough grilling’ by a bunch of MEPs next week.

Personally, I should bloody well hope he is. Europe’s entire biodiversity is about to be entrusted to his hands, which will already be full enough trying to juggle the enormous lobbying pressures that come with fisheries and maritime policy. The very least our prospective Environment Commissioner can expect, therefore, is to face a few difficult questions about how he actually intends to protect the bleeding environment.

But at this point, I would argue that it is irrelevant whether Vella even lands the job – still less whether he is made to sweat a little for it, like the rest of us common mortals at job interviews. It is the portfolio itself that should concern us… not who eventually gets to administer it.

If Juncker’s Commission is approved by the European Parliament, it would mean that the EU’s only democratically elected institution will have sanctioned a general downgrade of the standards of European environment and wildlife protection. And this brings me to another aberration … the way citizens’ concerns are consistently sidelined by an institution we had always been told puts its citizens first.

The same Jean-Claude Juncker who dropped this bombshell on us also claims – in his ‘Political Guidelines’ for the incoming Commission – that his “key task… is to restore European citizens’ confidence”. What better way to achieve that aim, I wonder, than to simply ignore the one policy area that has time and again cropped up as a major concern among European citizens?

Perhaps Juncker never bothered reading the endless Eurobarometer surveys his own Commission regularly conducts; but if he ever does, he might notice the stark detail that around 95% of Europe’s 500 million citizens consistently claim that protecting the environment is “important to them personally”.

And yet, the 10 priority areas he set down in the same document do not even mention this concern. For the record, Juncker’s priorities are: 1) Jobs, growth and investment; 2) A connected digital single market; 3) Energy and climate change; 4) A fairer internal market; 5) A fairer monetary union; 6) a free-trade agreement with the US; 7) Justice and fundamental rights; 8) A new policy on migration; 9) A stronger foreign policy; 10) A union of democratic change.

The only area where ‘the environment’ so much as peeps over the corner of the page is Point 3: ‘energy and climate change’. But read the smaller print, and it becomes painfully apparent that Juncker’s concerns have less to do with environmental considerations than with international politics. Europe, he tells us “relies too heavily on fuel and gas imports… if the price for energy [sic] from the East becomes too expensive, either in commercial or in political terms, Europe should be able to switch very swiftly to other supply channels…”

I don’t think you need a Masters in European Studies to figure out which ‘eastern’ source of cheap energy is worrying Mr Juncker at the moment. A cursory look at the EU sanctions recently (and very half-heartedly) imposed on Russia – and which seem to be carefully crafted to avoid jeopardising certain EU member states’ reliance on Russian fuel imports – should suffice.

But can anyone guess why the only ‘price’ cited in connection with European energy imports is of a ‘commercial’ or ‘political’ nature? What about the environmental cost of Europe’s addiction to fossil fuel? Why is that not mentioned anywhere in the Commission’s list of priorities?

The conclusion can only be one. If Juncker singled out the need for diversification of energy sources at all, it is not because Europe’s heavy dependence on finite fossil fuels is in itself environmentally unsound, or a foremost cause for concern among European citizens, or anything like that. It is merely because the EU’s present energy policy involves depending on countries we may find ourselves at war with next week. Everything else is secondary.

Yet another area of concern to emerge from Juncker’s proposals – little to do with the environment this time – is his extraordinary response to policy areas where individual member states have kicked up something of a fuss in recent years.

Karmenu Vella is not the only nominee to have raised eyebrows across Europe. Juncker’s decision to hand the financial services sector to Britain’s Commissioner-designate, Jonathan Hill, has also been questioned… as has his somewhat more alarming suggestion that the UK may be allowed to ‘renegotiate its accession treaty’ on his watch.

It is no secret that the UK is currently reconsidering its membership of the EU: the possibility of a 2017 referendum is in fact being discussed as we speak. British Prime Minister David Cameron has been accused (by former Commissioners) of ‘keeping his hand on the door-handle’… in other words, using this threat of a British pull-out as leverage to secure more concessions from Brussels.

This might sound vaguely familiar to those of us who remember Malta’s tortuous road to EU membership in 2003. Questions such as ‘can individual member states renegotiate their accession treaties’ were paramount back then. Opposition leader Alfred Sant had built his entire campaign platform around that very possibility. Yet at the time, the idea was consistently and roundly shot down by one visiting Commissioner after another. 

Even after accession – and yes, even under the Gonzi administration – efforts were made to renegotiate specific aspects of Malta’s commitments under the accession treaty. Former Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, founder of the euro-sceptic ‘Front Maltin Inqumu’, has consistently argued that the entire accession treaty should be renegotiated from scratch. The reply has always been the same: “No way, José.”

More recently, Resources Minister George Pullicino said in 2009 that if the proposed wind farm on Sikka l-Bajda failed to generate the desired levels of power (in actual fact it failed to ever even materialise, but anyway…), Malta may have to renegotiate its 2020 targets “due to the size and specific circumstances of Malta, including deep water depths”.

Yet again, the Commission’s response was that no such renegotiation would be permitted.

But that, it seems, applies only to Malta. When Britain wants to renegotiate its accession treaty, suddenly it becomes a top priority for the incoming Juncker Commission. Last April – when Britain’s prime minister tried unsuccessfully to sabotage his ascent to the presidency – Juncker told Cameron that “as commission president, I will work for a fair deal for Britain”.

“No reasonable politician could neglect we have to find solutions for the political concerns in the UK,” he said… significantly adding: “We have to do this to keep UK in.”

Of course, a similar ‘fair deal’ for Malta was and still is out of the question. In all areas where EU directives manifestly work out to Malta’s disadvantage – for instance, immigration – we have always been told to just lump it. But then again, unlike Britain we didn’t exactly have ‘our hand on the door-handle’. And this same general pattern – i.e., of simply caving in to blackmail - underpins all Jean-Claude Juncker’s other odd little Commission nominations, too.

It goes like this: Britain threatens to leave the EU – citing the need to protect its financial services sector – so the Commission president hands responsibility for financial services to the Brits… and even offers them a freshly renegotiated package of the kind that has always been denied to us. Likewise, Hungary’s ultra-conservative rightwing government falls foul of Europe’s standards of civil rights… and what does Juncker do? He gives the civil rights portfolio to Hungary, of course. Meanwhile France moans and groans about how the EU’s economic direction has been monopolised by Germany… so the French Commissioner gets to direct European economic policy from now on.

In all cases the pattern is the same: if you complain enough about it, you’ll eventually get to regulate the entire sector. And it applies perfectly to Vella’s nomination too: Malta constantly tries to twist European law to the advantage of its own hunters and trappers; so of course it makes perfect sense to not only give Malta’s Commissioner full control of European wildlife protection… but to even ask Karmenu Vella to ‘upgrade’ the Wild Birds Directive in order to make it a ‘more modern piece of European legislation.

You know, the same piece of European legislation that Vella’s home government has done nothing but twist, manipulate and deform since winning that election back in March 2013.

This, then, is the direction the European Union is poised to take under its new Commission presidency. At which point, I think it is only legitimate to ask if the EU taking shape before our eyes is in fact the same EU we joined back in 2004.

It sure as hell doesn’t look that way to me…