There are times when you just have to despair at the degree of selfishness that people (even/especially important people who have to make big decisions) can display at times. I wrote the other day about the Polish objection to tougher CO2 emissions reduction targets, but now today the European Parliament decided that lunch was more important than voting on a report on raising emissions reductions targets.

Lets get this straight: some MEPs thought that it was more important to go for lunch, than to do their job, finish voting from this Part Session, and make progress on an important report on a hugely important topic. I don’t know what was in the canteen today, but judging from the usual fare they offer up, I struggle to see how those hungry MEPs were unable to resist it.

Poland really knows how to set expectations! I didn’t have much hope that environmental issues and countering climate change would be high on the agenda during the Polish presidency of the Council of Ministers, but with Poland standing alone against an attempt to tighten CO2 emissions reduction targets, I guess any hope that the EU will try to up its game for the COP17 climate talks in Durban this December are pretty much scuppered.

The public rationale behind the Polish position seems to be that the country is so reliant on coal fired power stations, that a target for 50% cuts in emissions would be too strenuous for the country. Now I’m sorry, but does a whole continent really have to be held back by poor energy planning in one country?! Surely a better approach would be to work out a way for Poland to transition to renewables, and lower-carbon energy, while letting the rest of us get on with trying something (even if it isn’t much) to tackle the problem?

As is usually the way of these things, Brussels is alight (at least, the constitutionally geeky bits of it are) with talk of transnational lists for the next European Parliament elections in 2014. As far as I can tell, this radical idea hasn’t filtered through to the national level. Which is kind of odd, since the whole exercise is meant to bring the people closer to ‘Europe’.
I kind of like the idea of having a set of MEPs elected from a pan-European list, hopefully elevated above the usual popularity contest politics of European elections. It’ll probably mean a lot more French and German MEPs, but they dominate Brussels anyway.
What it will definitely mean though, if Andrew Duff MEP (UK, Lib Dem, promoting the new list in the Parliament) gets his way, is a change to the treaties. Now… surely when we’ve just come through a massive period of constitutional change, there can’t be any appetite for embarking on a whole new constitutional convention?! And since it will have to pass through several referenda, including a very hostile one in the UK, does it really make sense to do it like this.
Come to think of it, does it really make sense to do it at all? The level of consultation with national political parties has been quite low, if the absence of mention of it in my own party is anything to go by. Though I like the idea, the practical side of putting it into place seems to have been thought up entirely within the Brussels bubble: not the place that an initiative to bring citizens closer to the EU should really spend its formative years.