EU lawmaker group to challenge combustion engine ban this year
BRUSSELS, March 12 (Reuters) - The European Parliament's biggest lawmaker group said on Wednesday it will attempt to overturn the European Union's main climate policy for cars - a 2035 ban on sales of new CO2-emitting vehicles - during a review of the plan this year.
The ban's supporters say it is crucial to Europe's green ambitions and guiding the automotive sector's low-carbon transformation. But critics say it will handicap European carmakers already struggling with weak demand, Chinese competition and disappointing electric vehicle sales.
Jens Gieseke, the centre-right European People's Party's (EPP) negotiator on car policies, told Reuters the group would use a planned review of the policy in the third or fourth quarter to seek amendments.
It will propose changes such as allowing sales of combustion engine cars running on synthetic fuels and biofuels as well as plug-in hybrid vehicles beyond 2035.
"It was a mistake to ban the combustion engine," said Gieseke, a German EU lawmaker. "If fuels lead to a less carbon-intensive footprint, this should be recognised."
The European Commission - whose president, Ursula von der Leyen, belongs to the EPP - has so far resisted pressure to weaken the 2035 policy, which it says provides investment certainty.
However, the Commission last week brought forward a 2026 review of the policy to this year, and yielded to pressure from automakers by giving them three years, rather than one, to comply with 2025 emission limits.
Gieseke said if other EU lawmakers agreed, the 2035 target could be brought into negotiations on the 2025 limits as early as next month.
A majority of the European Parliament and a reinforced majority of EU countries must approve any changes to the car policies.
Italy and the Czech Republic, plus the party of Germany's likely next chancellor Friedrich Merz, have vowed to revise the 2035 target. But a senior EU diplomat said that, for now, most countries did not support amending the goal.
The EPP holds 188 of the 720 seats in the European Parliament but would need other lawmaker groups' support for any changes.
Right-wing EU lawmakers favour changing the 2035 policy. But the Socialists and Greens oppose weakening emissions goals, and argue the focus should be supporting carmakers to transition to electric vehicles and catch up with Chinese competitors.
Socialist EU lawmaker Mohammed Chahim warned during a European Parliament debate on Wednesday that "nostalgia" for traditional vehicles risked stifling innovation.
"I feel like I'm in the boardroom of Nokia when the iPhone was just released," he said.
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Imperialism still overshadows our intellectual history
Peter Watson begins his survey of the history of ideas in Britain with the assertion that the national mindset (which at that time was the English mindset) changed significantly after the accession of Elizabeth I. His book – a guide to the nature of British intellectual curiosity since the mid-16th century – begins there, just as England had undergone a liberation from a dominant European authority: the shaking off of the influence of the Roman Catholic church and the advent of the Reformation, and the new opportunities that offered for the people. He describes how a culture based largely on poetry and on the court of Elizabeth then redirected the prevailing intellectual forces of the time. This affected not just literature (Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson) but also helped develop an interest in science that grew remarkably throughout the next few centuries. The 'imagination' of Watson's title is not merely the creative artistic imagination, but also that of scientists and inventors and, indeed, of people adept at both. The book is, according to its footnotes, based on secondary sources, so those well read in the history of the intellect in Britain since the Reformation will find much that is familiar. There is the odd surprise, such as one that stems from the book's occasional focus on the British empire and the need felt today to discuss its iniquities. Watson writes that the portion of the British economy based on the slave trade (which must not be conflated with empire) was between 1 per cent and 1.4 per cent. He also writes that for much of the era of slavery the British had a non-racial view of it, since their main experience of the odious trade was of white people being captured by Barbary pirates and held to ransom. While this cannot excuse the barbarism endured by Africans shipped by British (and other) slavers across the Atlantic, it lends some perspective to a question in serious danger of losing any vestige of one. Watson does not come down on one side or the other in the empire debate, eschewing the 'balance sheet' approach taken by historians such as Nigel Biggar and Niall Ferguson; but he devotes too much of the last section of his book to the question, when other intellectual currents in the opening decades of the 21st century might have been more profitably explored, not least the continuing viability of democracy. Earlier on, he gives much space to an analysis of Edward Said, and questions such as whether Jane Austen expressed her antipathy to slavery sufficiently clearly in the novel Mansfield Park. But then some of Watson's own analyses of writers and thinkers are not always easily supported. He is better on the 18th century – dealing well with the Scottish enlightenment (giving a perfectly nuanced account of Adam Smith) and writers such as Burke and Gibbon – than he appears to be on the 19th. He gives Carlyle his due, but cites an article in a learned American journal from 40 years ago to justify his claim that Carlyle's 'reputation took a knock' in 1849 with the publication of his Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question. Watson says readers were offended by the use of the term 'Quashee' to describe a black man. They may well, if so, have been unsettled by the still less palatable title that the Discourse was subsequently given, which was The Nigger Question: it appeared thus in a 1853 pamphlet and in the Centenary Edition of Carlyle's works in 1899. That indicates the Discourse did Carlyle's reputation no lasting harm at the time, whatever it may have done since. In seeking to pack so much into fewer than 500 pages of text, Watson does skate over a few crucial figures. Some of his musings on empire might have been sacrificed to make more space for George Orwell, for example. A chapter in whose title his name appears features just one brief paragraph on him, about Homage to Catalonia, and later there is a page or so on Animal Farm, which says nothing new. Of Orwell's extensive and mould-breaking journalism there is nothing – somewhat surprising in a book about the British imagination when dealing with one of its leading exponents of the past century. Watson emphasises scientific discovery and innovation, and the effect on national life and ideas caused by the Industrial Revolution. These are all essential consequences of our intellectual curiosity, and he is right to conclude that the historic significance of Britain in these fields is immense. He includes league tables of Nobel prizewinners by nation in which Britain shows remarkably well. But these prizes are not the only means by which the contribution to civilisation and progress by a people are measured. There are notable omissions. Although Watson talks about the elitist nature of 'high culture' – such as Eliot and The Waste Land – he does not discuss how far the British imagination, and the British contribution to world civilisation, might have advanced had we taken the education of the masses more seriously earlier. We were, until the Butler Education Act of 1944, appalling at developing our human resources, and have not been much better since. It is surprising that there is no discussion of British music, one of the greatest fruits of the imagination of the past 150 years. And there is no analysis of the role of architecture, which, given its impact and its centrality to many people's idea of themselves as British, surely merited examination. 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Is Xi Jinping's time up?
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His official obituary describes him as 'an outstanding proletarian revolutionary', who was 'one of the main founders and leaders of the revolutionary base areas in the Shanxi-Gansu border region'. In short, Xi Zhongxun was an early hero and 'big beast' of the CCP. He passed his 'red genes' on to Xi Jinping, the primus inter pares of the 'princelings' who have come to dominate China's politics over the past decade. As such, it was no surprise that at the recent inauguration of the Revolutionary Memorial Hall in Shaanxi, it was planned to name it after Xi Zhongxun. But it didn't happen. At the last minute, in a low-key ceremony, his name was not only expunged from the title but omitted entirely from the memorial. A similarly strange story attaches to the 40-episode drama series Time in the Northwest, which followed Xi Zhongxun's life story. 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