TAG: Water
Fires and a toppled statue: Farmers clash with police by EU Parliament
BRUSSELS — Police fired water at protesting farmers who clogged the streets of Brussels with tractor...
8 months ago
France axes tractor fuel hike, cuts red tape to appease angry farmers
PARIS — The French government on Friday promised to cut taxes on agricultural fuel and reduce bureau...
8 months ago
Russian bombs failed to destroy Ukraine’s energy grid. Corruption could break its own
When Vladimir Putin landed in Khabarovsk on his tour of Russia’s Far East last week, he was given a...
8 months ago
How the EU’s flagship nature law became an electoral punching bag
BRUSSELS — Election fever is slowly killing an embattled law seeking to rehabilitate the European Union’s ailing rivers, forests and seas. The Nature Restoration Law, once billed as a pillar of the European Green Deal, is a shadow of its former self after...
6 months ago
EU takes the ax to green farming rules
The European Commission is finalizing a series of legislative proposals that would severely weaken environmental requirements for farmers — flying in the face of advice by its top scientists that agriculture must become more sustainable or it will be deci...
6 months ago
Intensive pig farming hogs scarce water in drought-hit Catalonia
BARCELONA — In the region of Osona, to the north of Barcelona, there are seven times as many pigs as people.Hectares of pig farms — long, barrack-like brick buildings with half-closed windows — stretch from the roadside into the distance. Metal cylinders...
6 months ago
A new inconvenient truth: Europe’s global plans all require money no one has
BRUSSELS — EU leaders are on a grandiloquent streak, even by their standards.The EU can stay relevant in a world of resurgent big power politics. Europe won’t drown in the sea of public cash the U.S. and China are throwing at futuristic industries. We can...
5 months ago
Contaminated food and resurrected bacteria: EU agency sounds alarm over health risks of warming waters
Serious food poisoning from contaminated fish, drug-resistant bacteria emerging from melting permafrost and reindeer populations decimated by anthrax — these are just some of the looming threats to Europe as the Continent's waters warm, the European Envir...
4 months ago
When the water runs dry: Why France is freaking out over a tiny Swiss dam
GENEVA — At the western edge of Lake Geneva, where the mighty Rhône river squeezes through a narrow dam, a blunder of French diplomacy is carved into stone for all to see. The inscription, mounted on the walls of an old industrial building, commemorates t...
4 months ago
Don’t bring a plastic bottle to the Olympics — unless you’re Coca-Cola
The French would call it deux poids, deux mesures — literally, “two weights, two scales” — or a double standard, for us anglophones. At the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, you won’t be able to bring in plastic bottles. But Coca-Cola, which has exclusi...
2 months ago
Von der Leyen threads the climate needle to keep her job
BRUSSELS — Ursula von der Leyen has just pulled off a delicate green balancing act. The German politician secured a second term as European Commission president on Thursday with a political program carefully designed to woo both conservatives and environm...
2 months ago
The EU says it wants food security. It really wants exports.
BRUSSELS — Food security: It’s the new slogan dominating European farming. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has pinned it at the top of her agricultural agenda, promising European lawmakers that she would ensure it in her second term. Th...
2 months ago
EU’s first application for cultivated meat is for French foie gras
French food startup Gourmey has become the first company to apply for EU market access for cultivated or “lab-grown” meat, after it submitted an application for a cell-based duck product to the European Commission on Thursday.The novel food would be used...
2 months ago
How Brexit’s fallout doomed climate action in Northern Ireland
ANTRIM HILLS, Northern Ireland — Nestled away in Northern Ireland’s sprawling Antrim Hills, a wind turbine towers over a beef farm. Its sweeping blades generate all the energy the farm needs, and send excess electricity back to the power grid, where it is...
2 months ago