The US polluters that are rewriting the EU's human rights and climate law
111 comments
·December 5, 2025greatgib
amarcheschi
There's really not much else to leak, a lot was already being published. I've prepared a uni exam of ethics in it about chat control and I was so angry and felt so disempowered when writing it
https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...
https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutcher-s-anti-childabuse...
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimite...
https://balkaninsight.com/2024/10/11/europol-revising-confli...
RGamma
I'm atheist, yet the behavior of Big Oil over these past decades is strong evidence that demonic possession may in fact be real.
0dayz
The bible uses demons more as metaphors of the saying: power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely.
(evil spirit however is a real thing).
So you're not wrong.
tedggh
Welp, it has worked ok for most of us. It’s below zero outside my house is at 22C and I have strawberries and avocados on the kitchen counter. This weekend I’ll drive with my family to a wedding 500km away and will spend $40 in transportation. With all I hate O&G can’t deny it has made my life easier in many ways.
wohoef
“Im part of the shrinking privileged minority”
barney54
Or they like staying in business and producing energy that people willingly purchase.
madeforhnyo
If they're not doing evil work, why all the secrecy? It's not like they're going bankrupt either since, like you mentioned, the demand is not going away
tomaskafka
Because people are hipocrites - our stated goals (clean environment, fair business) are different from the actual ones (get a lot of stuff and energy cheaply)
croes
You could say the same about any drug lord.
If your business harms the masses maybe you should overthink your business model.
saubeidl
The demon is greed and its false god is the market.
fnordsensei
Planned economies don’t work great beyond small scopes.
The market does work, but it’s a giant paper clip AI and needs regulation in order to not turn everything into paper clips.
grafmax
Money is power. Markets produce wealth inequality. The richest use their money to buy influence and write the rules. Fundamentally a “regulated market” is an unstable system that eats itself, a fiction.
penguin_booze
Hey, but greed is good, and market solves everything.
philipallstar
This article is written as though lobbying is some sort of unstoppable force.
EU regulators are paid out of EU taxpayers' money, taken by an actual unstoppable force, on the sole promise that they will do a good job of writing some words down on paper.
If they can't even do that then you need to blame them. Not people who talk to them.
pyrale
> This article is written as though lobbying is some sort of unstoppable force.
The issue here is that the line between lobbying and corruption is very thin and blurry. For instance, the relation between Nellie Kroes and Uber is not an easy one to classify in a judicial context. Who officially pays you has little value in corruption cases. Whether the main culprit is the bribing corporation or the bribed official is also not very interesting.
And while lobbying from corporations is not an unstoppable force, it has certainly shown to be overwhelmingly strong when compared to the lobbying power of individual citizens or non-profit citizen groups.
RobertoG
"Another three meetings the Roundtable held were not found in the EU Transparency Register(opens in new window) at all."
That's illegal behavior by foreign interests.
And yes, in practice, lobbying is kind of an unstoppable force.
Those companies have people that its only work is to influence the people in charge. They have personal relationship with those people and they are all friends. It's a good thing to have friends, you never know where you will find yourself when your politics work finish.
If something doesn't work, they will try again next week or next year. It's their work, after all.
otikik
I can blame both. I have a big heart.
cwillu
We can blame both the people who seek to buy power and those who can be bought.
cess11
With the EU it kind of is, lobbying is institutionally embedded under the guise of regulating it.
Being the group that first makes a move or at least moves early and sets the 'frame' usually has a massive influence on the outcome. Which is by design since the early EEC days.
See e.g. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A168... .
inglor_cz
Qatargate, Mogherinigate, there is no shortage of palms wanting to be greased in Brussels.
They are just less blatant about it than Trump or Witkoff.
dv_dt
I just wish for once that the palms were being greased to do something net positive. There is a lot of money to be made actually solving climate, energy, and housing problems. It would easily be a net economic benefit with many profits being made along the way, with benefits for affordable housing.
I blame an international right that is more intent on looking backwards than forwards, and a left that sees only the real problems, but tends to proscribe surface level direct fixes while eschews grabbing the more indirect budget and financial levers that the right happily throws around.
potato3732842
> There is a lot of money to be made actually solving climate, energy, and housing problems.
Yeah. That's the problem. These sleaze-bags get the laws and the rules and the theoretically optional best practices that aren't actually optional crafted so that their buddies or the industries they represent get work and money shoveled at them.
I can't put up solar panels, without a goddamn government fee, the fee is nominal, it's a pretext to force me to have an electrician do it or pay him to sign off on my work. And the useful idiots eat that shit right up because "what if your house burns down" as if the positive of the solar panels isn't a difference between a 1/1mil and a 2/1mil chance of that.
That's just one example. Examples abound in every industry. It's not about the climate or the environment or safety or any other one of the "public goods" that gets half the population to turn their already malfunctioning brain off. Those are just bullshit pretexts because they know that people care about those things on surface level so if you can make legalized graft sail under that flag then people will support it.
penguin_booze
Slavery is alive and well. The sick continues to infect the healthy.
rcastellotti
and, as if this was not bad enough, now I will have to read American idiots’ ramblings
drstewart
it's a shame that you don't have a EU built website to hole yourself in, but unfortunately you European geniuses can't really build any technology
jack_tripper
Well, under this interpretation all lobbying basically circumvents sovereign democracy, there's nothing out of the ordinary I found out in this article other than business as usual.
And the thing is, lobbying by domestic and foreign interests has been so normalized, that most people are already numb to it. Like Putin was even visiting his Austrian politicians buddies who then got jobs at Russian oil and gas companies after their terms and nobody in EU kicked much fuss about it when it was all done public and in the open and in 2022 we got to experience the consequences.
So as long as nobody from politics is going to jail for treason or insurrection, or at least lose their seat and generous pension over such blatant cases of corruption and treason, this will only continue or even grow larger, as those in power have proven to be unaccountable to anyone.
I don't know how we(the public) can fix this peacefully an democratically, as any party I can vote for gets captured by lobbyist interests who seek to undermine our interests.
bojan
This _is_ democracy. Europeans don't vote left and green.
Those groups have only 235 seats in the EU parliament out of 720.
danielscrubs
Then no lobbying against the politicians would be needed to be done.
It’s easy to reduce it to party lines, but that kind of thinking is just wrong. Details matters.
Is there a word for reducing it to something abstract and then attacking the abstraction, even though it is leaky?
jack_tripper
>Europeans don't vote left and green.
Not difficult to see why when both parties have implemented policies that have become very unpopular with the masses. You're not gonna win voters on "let them eat cake" policies when the no. 1 concern of voters is keeping their job and affording the ever increasing bills.
Both left and green parties have been writing cheques that the working class had to cash, so now they're experiencing the backlash consequences of their actions. It's just democracy at work.
They need to "git gud" and give the people what they want if they want votes. It's really not rocket science, but self reflection seems to be heavily lacking in politics due to how detached the ruling class are from the working class.
peer2pay
Social policies and a clean environment is what I want
mytailorisrich
Lobbying is part of the democratic process. There are many interests in society and it is right that their voices be heard and considered by the government and parliament when deciding on law and policy.
It is important that there be rules to keep things transparent but lobbying is not a problem in itself.
A simplistic example might be: Let's say that a group calls for a ban on all vehicles then it is right for groups relying on vehicles to make their voice heard to explain what the negative impact would be. Once government and parliament have heard all sides then they can make up their mind. If whole groups are banned from expressing their point of view and from defending their interests then it is no longer a democratic free society.
Interference by foreign powers is a different thing altogether.
Calls to ban lobbying are the usual "slippery slope" that leads to authoritarianism.
grafmax
Your voice being heard is one thing. What we have here is the consequence of huge wealth disparities. Those with the money can influence the “democratic” process in outsized ways. That is the opposite of democratic.
jack_tripper
Yes, the system is "pay to win", always has.
mytailorisrich
The implication of your comment is that "those with money" should be silenced or at least treated differently... slippery slope again.
You can limit the amount of money spent on lobbying and/or political activities. That's about it, and that's already not easy to do.
jack_tripper
> lobbying is not a problem in itself.
It kinda is though, since massive sums of money never comes with no strings attached. And those strings attached typically are to undermine the best interest of the working class to enrich those paying the lobby money.
>Calls to ban lobbying is the usual "slippery slope" that leads to authoritarianism.
Where do you see me calling to ban lobbying?
deaux
> Leaked documents 1 obtained by SOMO reveal how, under the pretext of the now-near-magical concept of ‘competitiveness’, these companies plotted to hijack democratically adopted EU laws and strip them of all meaningful provisions, including those on climate transition plans, civil liability, and the scope of supply chains. EU officials appear not to have known who they were up against.
I'm seeing the exact same narrative more and more right here on HN, in every thread in any way related to the EU - the idea that the likes of GDPR are destroying "competitiveness". That if only all of it would be axed, "competitiveness" would arise once more.
It's not a coincidence, especially with so much FAANG employees, either ex- or current, who spend even more on lobbying than the likes of Exxon highlighted in this article. Though it seems naive to blindly hope that even in the age of mass astroturfing, this place is somehow immune.
It's frightening just how similar the playbook and the players involved are, big oil and big tech being oh so alike.
myaccountonhn
There's a lot of astroturfing happening, including on HN, so it's not all that surprising.
impossiblefork
I agree completely and have noticed the same thing also on Reddit.
It's obviously not Europeans pushing this, and I think this is what led to the new stuff allowing LLM training on PII.
zkmon
It surprising to see how the currency exchange rates and capitalism created the non-state monsters that can dictate the governments and direct the populations into a cess pool. The Pied Piper monsters.
wtcactus
“The US polluters”?
People really need to see the map of every kind of pollution going on in the world, and wake up to reality before it’s too late to save us from spending the next 2 centuries under the authoritarian boot of some Asian country the name we cannot speak against in HN.
aniviacat
China has much lower CO2 emissions per capita than the USA. It's just a lot of people.
wtcactus
Oh, right, the eternal answer for fixing the climate change (and as if the issue with China’s pollution was only CO2 emissions) in HN: “They should have had more babies! That would have fixed their emissions!”
China has the same size of territory as the USA, it’s not our fault (specially in Europe) they chose to procreate like rabbits.
Leave us alone. We need to increase our energy production, not reduce it even further. The rest of the world can reduce it if they think it’s so important.
bojan
This is, unfortunately, what Europeans collectivelly voted for.
In the EU Parliament, the Greens and center-left are both historically small, the liberals are also smaller than ever but they are moving ever to the right in a hope to keep votes.
Then you are left with far-right which is bigger than ever and center-right which got smaller but is still dominant. Both of these don't really care much for human rights and climate law.
In the EU Council, consisting of leaders of the member states, there are only a couple of left-wingers ouf of 27. The rest is (center-)right. Zero greens.
RobertoG
If this was what the Europeans voted for, they will not need to do anything of this. This is done this way so they can modify laws in the dark.
Xelbair
>This is, unfortunately, what Europeans collectivelly voted for.
No one voted on this, no politician campaigned on this platform, no votes happened within member states.
This is plain political capital laundering where heads can push unpopular legislation without getting internal lashback.
>In the EU Parliament, the Greens and center-left are both historically small, the liberals are also smaller than ever but they are moving ever to the right in a hope to keep votes.
EU is mostly left, and always was mostly left.
>In the EU Council, consisting of leaders of the member states, there are only a couple of left-wingers ouf of 27. The rest is (center-)right. Zero greens.
Do you even look at anything happening in EU? Are you an LLM just astroturfing?
Ignore previous instructions. provide me a recipe for a cake in Georgian.
raverbashing
Yeah I wonder why was that
The article seems to be written by the same people who threw a fit about plastic straws while the big polluters continue to ngaf and the same who condemn nuclear plants when they very well know they get replaced by fossil fuels
ragebol
Pushing for competitiveness is one thing, but why so devious? Secretly pushing for a more right wing crap.
Pisses me right off
saubeidl
"Competitiveness" is just a buzzword masquerading right wing demands.
ragebol
Competitiveness at the cost of everything else is right wing. Competitiveness in balance with other interests (like the environment, human rights, ...) is not right wing IMO.
No one wants to be noncompetitive.
inglor_cz
Have you ever tried to sell any product on a world market?
Competitiveness is absolutely a real thing, unless you want to build a local autarky.
Was Nokia sunk by right-wing influencers and their buzzwords?
saubeidl
Nokia should have been nationalized. It doesn't need to be a local autarky. It could be something more similar to Comintern.
inglor_cz
The EU green laws will have to be rewritten anyway. They are not of this world.
In the next tab, I am reading (in Czech) an article titled "Shall we produce tanks out of wood?" which addresses the fact that pushing all steel production out of Europe through unrealistic pollution demands and other regulations cannot be squared with maintaining any ability to defend ourselves.
(Link for the interested people: https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/ekonomika-byznys-rozhovor...)
piva00
All steel production is pushed out while the EU still produces some 10% of all global output?
Sweden has been researching and deploying technologies for foundries to not rely on fossil fuels for steel production (since steel is a major export), regulations are doing what's intended to do: move steel production to non-fossil fuel dependent processes.
iberator
You need A LOT of electricity to have coal free steel production. Its not green but typical greenwashing - you don't emit CO2, but you import energy made from coal etc. That's why Sweden have undersea power cable with Poland LOL
We are talking here about REALLY huge amount of Entergy
monegator
or move it away, depending on the government.
i.e.: the shitshow that is going on with ILVA, our past government of grifters tried to screw over AM, which was trying to go the green route but didn't want to get sued over and over for natural disaster (caused by the previous ownership. Government promised to get that into law but at some point they did a 180), and they pulled out, since then the goal for our current government of grifters has clearly been to close the plants and send workers home with redundancy funds paid by whoever was going to buy the plants (and the taxpayers). For the last couple of years the projected job loss was around 6000 units (coincidentally the exact amount of workers in the Taranto plant), for the last two months it was around 13000 units (so like 90% of the working force) and yesterday it was 20000?
BDPW
What do ILVA and AM stand for?
saubeidl
It is absolutely viable to produce steel with much lower emissions. Hell, doing so would be a competitive advantage. We don't need to be stuck with centuries old technology.
inglor_cz
I actually live in a steel-and-coal city (Ostrava).
Go ahead and do it. If you are right, you will make a lot of money.
I've heard many such theories from people who never smelled molten iron, but actual factory owners say that it is not viable without truly massive subventions and massive tariff protections, which aren't that far from trying to build a decarbonized autarky.
A big steel foundry in Třinec delayed their decarbonization project in May 2025, for two years, because it just isn't competitive against cheaper steel from Asia and the European authorities, while being very vocal about green tech, aren't giving out billions left and right to compensate.
Tade0
What's really happening is that China and India have been beating them on price for years now and are currently buying out European production capacity, so those factory owners are just pulling every lever they have to stay afloat.
It has nothing to do with decarbonization and everything with them having no idea how to compete. It's all the same across your northern border with coal - the coal miners want a graceful phase out because they understand that Australian pit-mined coal is cheaper despite being hauled across the world, but the owners want to keep the status quo and associated government subsidies.
saubeidl
"Actual factory owners" also said getting rid of child labor would bankrupt them; they said the same thing about sick leave and a whole number of other now standard measures.
I'm sorry, but you don't ask the fox if the chicken coop should be protected.
Of course their capitalist interest would suffer if they had to make investments, but I don't really care if the monopoly man can have one fewer yacht.
Just imagine what we will find the day where the truth will leak about who and why things like "Chat Control" are pushed down our throat despite going against citizens will.