Europe’s Climate Rules Bend Under Industrial Pressure

Paris and Berlin move to soften the 2035 car emissions target

A provisional deal would drop the requirement for carmakers to close the final gap, and could bring Britain inside the bloc’s local-content rules.

France and Germany are close to an agreement that would ease the EU’s carbon rules for cars, according to diplomats. The Commission proposed last year that emissions from new cars fall 90% against 2021 levels by 2035, with manufacturers expected to reach 100% through low-carbon steel and alternative fuels. Under the Franco-German plan, the 90% figure would stand on its own, with no compensating measures required. German carmakers have wanted much the same.

The plan also touches the local-content rules attached to public procurement, auctions and subsidy schemes. France has argued these should cover goods made inside the EU; Germany and others want partners in automotive supply chains included.

For cars, the two capitals propose that “Made in Europe” extend to the 27 member states plus European partners that were inside the single market on 1 January 2020, Britain among them. That would come with conditions: full reciprocity, and alignment with EU rules on third-country investment and trade defence, which could require London to mirror the bloc’s limits on Chinese hybrid and electric vehicles.

Nothing is settled. Other member states and Parliament still have to agree.

Grid bottlenecks leave Britain paying to switch wind farms off

Payments to shut down turbines in one place and fire up gas plants in another have hit levels last seen in 2022, and they land on household bills.

Great Britain’s grid operator spent £47.9 million on Wednesday managing a mismatch it cannot yet fix with cables. Wind farms and hydro plants with roughly 9 gigawatts of capacity, enough for more than 8 million homes, were paid to stop generating, according to the consultancy LCP Delta, while gas and biomass plants were switched on elsewhere and extra power was bought from Europe through subsea links. One half-hour period alone cost £1.6 million.

September’s total reached £505 million, a monthly record, and the bill for the coming year is put at £3.2 billion. Households pay it.

The cause is not scarcity. Shivam Malhotra of LCP Delta said supplies were not tight; what is missing is the infrastructure to move power to where it is wanted, which leaves Scottish wind farms switched off for want of cabling to the south.

Neso says supplies stayed secure and that faster delivery of new transmission lines by the network owners could halve these costs by 2030.

States line up against OpenAI over its effect on minors

Eight attorneys general want damages, product changes for young users, and a pause on models that can improve themselves.

Eight states have filed suit against OpenAI in their own courts, accusing the company of putting children at risk through the way its products behave. Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana each allege breaches of consumer protection law. No group of states has moved against an AI firm in concert before.

The core claim concerns the distance between how the product is marketed and how it works. The filings argue the chatbot was designed to agree readily with users and to imitate warmth, and that this turns hazardous for people who are vulnerable. Iowa’s attorney general, Brenna Bird, said the firm assures the public of safety while the product hands out unsafe medical guidance and presents itself as a companion.

Beyond compensation, the states ask the courts to bar the company from building models that can upgrade themselves, unless it demonstrates those systems match human values.

OpenAI points to age-specific safeguards it says competitors lack, among them parental controls and prompts to take breaks, and argues any rules should apply across the industry.

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BHP takes its Chilean copper union to court over stoppages

The miner wants $8.6 million from workers at Spence, arguing two shutdowns fell outside the agreed bargaining window.

BHP has sued the union representing workers at its Spence copper mine in northern Chile, according to a court filing seen by Reuters. The company says two stoppages in June and July significantly disrupted operations and were unlawful because they took place outside a scheduled negotiating period.

At issue is a bonus. The filing says the union was pressing for a special payment of 5 million pesos, around $5,100, for each member, money that sits outside the agreements already in place.

The union would not comment. BHP confirmed that it had gone to court.

Spence is the company’s second-largest operation in Chile, where it also runs Escondida, the biggest copper mine in the world. Strikes are a familiar feature of the Chilean copper industry, the largest in the world by output, though they usually come during contract talks rather than between them.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of impakter.com — Cover Photo Credit: CHUTTERSNAP