SOTEU SPECIAL: 🪞WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE TRUTH?

Roi Gomez·

Dear Reader,

💚 It’s Roi on the keyboard this week, back for my first edition after the summer break. And what can I say, I’ve missed you! If you work anywhere near the Brussels bubble, you probably know what Wednesday meant: State of the Union day. Once a year, the Commission President heads to the EU Parliament to take stock of where Europe is – and tell us where she thinks our continent should go next. So this week, we’re digging into Ursula von der Leyen’s sixth State of the Union – and what it tells us about where Europe is heading on climate, nature, pollution and the liveable future within reach.

☕ Grab a coffee – or consider buying us one – and let’s get into it.

🪞 WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE TRUTH?

“President von der Leyen is right to call this Europe’s ‘summer of truth’. Europeans have lived through another summer of heat, drought and devastating fires. The question now is what we do with that truth.”

That was the reaction from our Secretary General, Patrick ten Brink, after Wednesday’s State of the Union – a line picked up by Politico. And it feels like the right question to ask.

Von der Leyen did not mince her words. Climate change is one of the “tipping points of our time”. Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average. More than 35,000 additional deaths were recorded during this summer’s heatwaves, 660,000 hectares burned, and major rivers ran dangerously low. “All of this is a mere preview,” she warned.

There was plenty to welcome too. Europe “can, must and will” stay the course on its climate targets. A new climate resilience framework is coming next month, alongside a European Heatwave Plan. Water scarcity got serious attention, though the framing was a bit off (more on that later). And von der Leyen was clear that Europe needs both mitigation and adaptation.

But what do we actually do with this truth? Before looking ahead, let’s look back. Because we’ve heard some of these truths before.

In the 2020 SOTEU, von der Leyen warned that Europe’s consumption of raw materials, energy, water, food and land was “not sustainable”. Europe needed to change how it treated nature, produced and consumed, tackling everything from hazardous chemicals to deforestation and pollution.

In the 2022 SOTEU, faced with soaring energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she went to the root of it all: “the real problem was fossil fuels themselves, not just their price.”

Six years after the first warning and four years after the second (oh, and after decades of accurate scientific forecasts), Europe has just lived through a “summer of truth”. So, let’s take von der Leyen at her word – and ask what doing something with that truth would actually look like.

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🛡️ ADAPT, YES. BUT PREVENT.

First up: adaptation. Europe desperately needs to prepare for the climate impacts already locked in. A Heatwave Plan, protection for vulnerable regions, farming with nature, flood and wildfire prevention – bring it on.

But there is an uncomfortable limit to how far we can adapt. Ecosystems cannot turn on the air conditioning. Neither can everyone in Europe. So insulate homes from heat while cutting the fossil fuels burning the planet. Prepare for drought while restoring the ecosystems that keep water in our landscapes. Help farmers through extreme weather while rebuilding healthy soils.

Nature is our first line of defence. Forests, wetlands, rivers and healthy soils absorb water, cool landscapes and protect us from floods and drought. Yet nature did not feature in a speech with resilience at its heart.  Then there was water…

Sure, fix the leaky pipes. But Europe’s water crisis cannot be solved through plumbing alone. Von der Leyen focused heavily on securing water for agriculture and industry. Those needs are real, but so are people’s. And resilience ultimately depends on restoring a functioning water cycle – and actually delivering on the Water Framework Directive that has protected Europe’s waters for more than 25 years.

Then there is the obvious way of reducing the scale of the crisis we need to adapt to in the first place. Remember that 2022 quote? Four years ago, von der Leyen identified fossil fuel dependence as the underlying problem. Yet here we are, in another fossil fuel crisis, with an EU wasting vast amounts of energy it already has. Wednesday brought welcome calls for more homegrown clean energy, electrification and grids – but no new push to finish the job.

Let’s make this fossil fuel crisis Europe’s last. Heavy reliance on imported fossil fuels leaves our continent exposed to volatile energy prices.

🥵 YOU CAN’T SIMPLIFY A HEATWAVE

Now for the contradiction – or perhaps, the rebrand. After dominating Brussels for the past two years, the word “competitiveness” did not appear once in von der Leyen’s speech. Has Brussels’ favourite buzzword finally gone out of fashion?

Not quite. Simplification certainly hasn’t. Von der Leyen promised to slash administrative burdens, tackle “gold-plating” and speed up permitting for projects in Europe’s “strategic interests”.

But speeding things up and gutting protections are still being treated as the same thing. As von der Leyen announced yet more proposals to accelerate permitting, negotiations in Parliament on speeding up environmental assessments under the Environment Omnibus ended Wednesday without agreement, according to Politico’s Morning Sustainability newsletter.

Environmental protections exist to make sure that what we build, where we build it and how we build it do not create tomorrow’s crises on top of those we already have.

Competitiveness does not exist independently of the natural world. Industry needs water. Agriculture needs healthy soils. Cities need protection from heat and floods. As we argued earlier this month: businesses can adapt to regulation; they cannot simplify their way out of a drought.

After a “summer of truth”, weakening the protections designed to keep our air breathable, waters healthy and drinkable, and ecosystems functioning would send a terrible signal – especially to the 88% of EU citizens who want more EU-level action to tackle the climate emergency. And what counts as “strategic” is about to become even more important, because von der Leyen had another tipping point on her mind: AI.

🤖 THE AI IN THE ROOM

AI shared top billing with climate change as the other great “tipping point of our time”. Von der Leyen wants Europe to lead – while keeping “human agency” at the heart of how AI develops.

There is good reason for that. As our Deputy Secretary General Patrizia Heidegger put it after the speech, democracy depends on nuanced, fact-based debate, independent science and reliable information. In an age of AI and a growing battle of narratives, that matters even more.

But there was an elephant-sized pink server in the room: the infrastructure behind it. Data centres need land and consume huge amounts of electricity and water. Yet while AI featured prominently in the speech, those resource demands did not. At least not in this context. Nor the words “data centres”, for that matter.

So back to those “strategic interests”: will data centres count? And if they do, what happens when those ambitions collide with scarce water, stretched grids or vulnerable ecosystems? Moving faster cannot mean looking the other way. AI does not actually exist in the cloud. It exists in the physical world, too. And it might just become your neighbour.

Europe can lead on AI. But it should lead on making it sustainable, transparent and democratic.

🤫 WHAT SHE DIDN’T SAY

And then there was what we didn’t hear. For a speech about Europe’s resilience, independence, and economic future, some rather important pieces were missing.

Circular economy. Last year, von der Leyen called circular production central to Europe’s push for independence because it reduces strategic dependencies. Yet the upcoming Circular Economy Act went unmentioned. Circularity is industrial strategy – not an environmental side project.

Air pollution. Around 239,000 premature deaths in the EU every year are attributable to fine particulate matter at levels the WHO categorises as dangerous. Yet solving one of Europe’s biggest environmental health burdens did not get a mention.

PFAS and chemicals. Back in 2020, von der Leyen promised action on everything “from hazardous chemicals to deforestation to pollution”. Six years later, and after even her own Cabinet officials have tested positive for “forever chemicals”, Europeans still face contaminated water and the enormous costs of persistent chemical pollution. Whatever happened to the toxic-free environment?

And finally: who pays? As households, businesses and governments count the costs of another climate-battered summer, the world’s major oil companies with operations in Europe made €78 billion in profit – in just the first three months of this year. Read that again slowly. Europe has taxed extraordinary fossil-fuel profits before – and this is a new level of extreme.

↗️ CASCADES OF PROGRESS

If that all sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. But tipping points don’t only work in the wrong direction. There are positive ones too: moments when targeted action makes the next change easier, cheaper and faster, creating a “cascade of progress“.

And some are already happening. Renewables are spreading. Clean technologies are getting cheaper. Electrification is reducing fossil dependence. Restore a wetland, and you can protect nature, store carbon, hold water and reduce flood risk at the same time.

One change can make the next one easier. Which brings us back to where we started. Europe has had its “summer of truth”. But the truth itself isn’t new. We know fossil fuel dependence makes us vulnerable. We know healthy ecosystems make us more resilient. We know pollution costs lives and money.

So what do we do with that truth? Act on it. And start a cascade of progress.

By: Roi Gomez. Special thanks to the EEB’s editorial team: Ben Snelson. Editor: Christian Skrivervik

🧠✨ DOPAMINE HIT

As ever, here are a few happy updates to get your weekend off to a perky start:

  • South Africa’s top court blocked Shell’s Wild Coast oil search. Read more here.
  • Hungary to ban wild animals in circuses starting in 2027. Read more here
  • North Atlantic right whales have had their best year for calves since 2009. Read more here
  • Patagonia sues Trump over slashing of protected areas in Utah. Read more here

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