Summary
Qatar warned it’ll halt gas exports to the EU if fined under the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, which fines companies for human rights or environmental impacts, up to 5% of global revenue.
Qatari Energy Minister Saad Sherida al-Kaabi criticized the law as unworkable for QatarEnergy, a key LNG supplier to Europe.
The directive, part of the EU’s net-zero 2050 strategy, faces criticism but is set to be implemented by 2027.
The EU emphasizes its alignment with international standards and proportional enforcement of the rules.
If you’re waiting until everything is stable and safe and comfortable, you’ll never actually act. It’s always easier to destabilize and scare than it is to actually fix something. If the plan is to not move until it’s safe, anyone with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo will always be able to scare you into inaction.
That’s all very well, but we live in a democracy, which means that if public opinion isn’t managed, everything can be overturned. We have seen the US reelect an egregious crook and convicted rapist who promised dictatorship, partly out of anxiety about the price of eggs: telling several hundred million European voters that they need to become more evolved and less selfish as the spiking price of gas hits their cost of living will go down about as well, sweeping the likes of Le Pen, AfD and other Putinists and Nazis that aren’t even on the radar yet into power.
In order to tell the Qataris that we expect them to honour human rights, we need to be able to get away with it. We need to decarbonise, but that will take time (we could do it more quickly if the population was more willing to make sacrifices, but this isn’t Communist Cuba with its secret police, and a significant proportion of voters who even worry that they won’t be able to enjoy their little luxuries will have no qualms about going fash), so we need to pull our punches for now, but decarbonise as rapidly as feasible, and also build up reserves of gas to cushion any price shocks for when we tell the fossil despots what we really think of them. (And the more reserves we have, the sooner we can do that.)
Think about that for a moment
I’m hoping that the war with Russia has put pressure of EU governments to focus strongly on reducing reliance on foreign energy, but I’m skeptical.