Welcome to Better Europe’s weekly update on EU Affairs.
WE FINALLY MADE IT TO PARIS
The summer of 2026 showed us the devastating impact climate change is having on our homes, communities, and nature. That’s not us saying it — it’s the European Commission admitting that climate change hits different. So this week, the Commission presented its Climate Resilience Framework, with a new shared future for all member states: 1.5 degrees of warming by 2030, 2 by 2050, and 3 by 2100. That finally sounds like a Paris target Europe can easily meet, even if the focus is no longer on climate change mitigation, but on full-scale adaptation. The package offers an interactive Climate Viewer, a “Navigator of Climate Resilience Tools” and a “Solutions Explorer”, which sounds like a refreshing change from the usual Directives and Regulations. There is one Regulation, however, to impose the new road to Paris. But how we get there is blurry: “no obligations and no cash” for adaptation measures. Interestingly, the Commission in this week also discovered it has a fossil fuel problem. As in: we don’t have enough of it. Interestingly, it is Energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen who called the loss of a quarter of Europe’s refineries over twenty years ‘a wake-up call’ and ‘a matter of security’; only a few years after he ended Denmark’s oil exploration in the North Sea as Danish climate minister.
FINDING THE 28TH MEMBER STATE
Remember the proposal to make Canada the EU’s first “associate member”? Nobody knew what it really meant, and we still don’t know. Turned out it was just another episode of Queen Ursula making a big announcement only to find out that she doesn’t have the backing from the Member State she knows best… and the other 26. Because in fact no EU country was left really insisting on giving Canada a special role in the EU’s architecture. In any case, full membership as a 28th member state was always out on grounds of geography. Conveniently, the decision to cool down the rapprochement between Canada and the EU at their summit this week in Montreal will also please Canada’s southern neighbour, where president Trump called the proposal ‘laughable’ and a potential ‘hostile act’, and threatened with the usual tariff tantrum if Europe got too friendly with Ottawa. What’s left? “An ever-closer association of Canada to the EU, short of full membership itself”, a joint statement says — basically the arrangement Switzerland has, and the one Britain has spent a few years begging for.
ONE SMALL CAP FOR MAN
What is the best thing that came out of Brussels this century? Could it be borderless travel in the extended Schengen zone? Not quite. Could it be the euro, still not available everywhere or in digital format? Or perhaps free roaming on your mobile phone? Rules forcing companies to take responsibility for their supply chains? Universal USB-C chargers? No — the best symbol of European integration is our shared frustration at the attached bottle cap, a concept that again is unknown in potential 28th member states like Switzerland and the UK. Two years after Brussels chained our caps to our bottles, the tethered bottle cap more than ever represents a continent full of admin burden for citizens who are too stupid to think for themselves. But the rules that actually make a difference apply a lot more discreetly. Generic green claims are banned since September — so that same bottle-with-the-lid-attached no longer claims it is “100% recycled”. Instead, it will be “100% recycled. Excluding cap and label”. The cap rule itself faces evaluation in July 2027, when the Commission must judge whether fixing the caps has actually reduced litter, which was the formal reason for all this “admin burden”.