BRUSSELS — It was meant to be a debate on how to curb Europe’s soaring energy prices.
But the first session of talks at an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels Thursday quickly descended into a three-hour fight over whether the EU should put a carbon price on driving cars and heating buildings.
The delay got so bad, the roast veal and fig tartlet lunch awaiting European leaders was driven well into the afternoon.
Countries including Italy, Poland, Czechia and Hungary called for ETS2 — an already-legislated law that will put a carbon price on heating and transport from 2028 — to be delayed for two more years. Estonia suggested it could be scrapped altogether.
The push was rejected by a majority of the bloc, with several EU diplomats telling POLITICO it was, as one put it, an “unacceptable” offer. Another said the ETS2 launch date would never be changed. But the debate reflects a growing sense from right-leaning governments that the EU’s ambitious green agenda runs against their push to bring down energy costs.
While the main topic of today’s discussion was ETS2, its predecessor, the Emissions Trading System — which puts a price on carbon emissions from factories and power plants — was arguably the real target.
Put together, these two emissions trading schemes will be the EU’s most powerful policy tool for bringing down planet-warming emissions.
A proposed reform of the original ETS is currently being debated in the European Parliament and in the Council of the EU. Italy and Poland have been leading a gang of 10 member-countries which have been railing against the ETS since American and Israeli bombs started falling on Iran in March.
What they want is for the European Commission’s July review of the ETS to be further weakened, even though the proposal already softens carbon restrictions over the next decade to give industry more time to invest in cleaner production methods.
But by framing the ETS as a scourge on household bills, both Warsaw and Rome have found ready audiences at home and abroad. On Monday, hours before a meeting of EU environment ministers convened in Luxembourg, Poland led a meeting of member countries with concerns on the ETS. Their gang, which originally counted 10 countries in March, had now grown to 16.
While Italy and Poland did manage to get Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Greece to back their ask for a “reassessment of the ETS2” and to “further postpone its entry into force until at least 2030,” inside the room of European leaders the position mostly fell flat.
Five EU diplomats granted anonymity to discuss the ongoing negotiations said Nordic countries and the Netherlands were firmly against changes to ETS2 — a position backed by France and Germany.
But Paris and Berlin’s long-term reliability as ETS defenders is in doubt. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz both face threats from the far-right, where the ETS has become a dirty word.
Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland, which is no fan of the ETS, is politically ascendant, having won the largest share of votes in two regional elections in September. In France, with elections only months away in 2027, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally is leading in the polls.
How Le Pen would deal with the ETS isn’t certain, but Jordan Bardella, the French far-right lawmaker and rising star of National Rally, offered a clue in recent comments.
“ETS: three letters, an acronym that reeks of detached bureaucracy, with one question that keeps coming up: who’s going to pay?” he said to European Parliament in May.
BRUSSELS — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants EU leaders to look into the idea of developing bloc-wide strategic gas reserves amid concerns the continent faces a winter shortage, three diplomats and two EU officials told POLITICO.
Europe’s existing gas storage caverns — which are typically refilled over the course of the year by commercial actors — are running at record lows this year after high summer prices linked to the war in Iran undercut market incentives to restock, leaving the bloc underprepared for winter.
While it wasn’t immediately clear to diplomatic officials what form the reserve idea would take, one senior EU official described it as a long-term measure to cushion the bloc against future supply risks, as countries already do with oil and refined products. The Commission president’s comments came at a major summit of European leaders in Brussels on Thursday.
Documents detailing November plans to revamp the bloc’s gas security architecture, seen earlier this year by POLITICO, include plans to encourage better crisis management by companies. However, they stop short of explicitly endorsing strategic reserves that governments would have to fill to a set level to offset supply shortages, regardless of market conditions.
Countries that typically rely on commercial refilling have already been forced to change tack this year as the limits of the existing model became clear. The Netherlands has moved to subsidize energy purchases, costing it almost €1 billion, while Germany is exploring whether to develop its own strategic stockpile.
A separate Commission proposal to set up an EU-wide mechanism to carry out joint energy purchases was received without enthusiasm by EU leaders on Thursday, two diplomats said.
Concrete, one of the dirtiest substances ever concocted, could help save the planet | Aleksei Zotov/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
No, Rome was not built in a day, but it was built at breathtaking speed, its temples, amphitheaters, and aqueducts rising with the help of a magical blend of volcanic ash and lime. Today, that miraculous mortar has a less than enchanting name: concrete.
“Romans lived through a true architectural revolution, and at the foundation of this revolution, literally, was a concrete discovery,” said Admir Masic, a materials science professor at MIT who made waves a few years ago for unearthing the fast-hardening secret sauce for why Roman concrete is so durable. “They were able to take a pile of dirt and mix it together, add water, and turn it into solid rock of any arbitrary size. It literally changed everything.”
And yet, for a millennia after the fall of Rome, the world largely forgot about concrete, until, in the 18th century, an English mason found that mixing limestone and clay could form a paste that hardened underwater. Another few decades later, concrete as we now know it was reborn, and once again, it changed everything.
In the centuries since, concrete has come to reshape our way of life, with disastrous results for the climate. What early concrete evangelists didn’t realize was that the modern way of producing the substance released giant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As it has become increasingly central to modernity, it has helped fuel environmental catastrophe.
Today, however, a new generation of concretophiles like Masic have pored over the poured mixture in search of another miracle, a greener, more durable kind of concrete. And they’ve found multiple answers, from concrete that can heal its own cracks — as the Pantheon has for millennia — to electroconductive concrete capable of storing energy to a blend that allows concrete to soak up more CO2 than it emits.
Together, they suggest that in a not-so-distant future, concrete — yes, concrete — one of the dirtiest substances ever concocted, could help save the planet, transforming our built environment while actually intervening in the climate for the better.
How concrete built (and polluted) the modern world
It’s no wonder that luminaries of the neo-concrete age, Thomas Edison among them, marveled at the stuff just as their Roman predecessors had. They saw it as a harbinger of utopia, of a world in which anything and everything — a home, an interstate highway, a water pipe, a subway system, or a grand piano — could be molded and poured for a fraction of ordinary costs.
“As to concrete dogs to stand warningly in the front yard and concrete cats to purr stonily under a concrete kitchen range,” the New York Times teased Edison in 1911 when he described his plans for a concrete home finished with concrete furnishings, “he made no announcement.”
The beguiled inventor’s utopian vision of a world remade by concrete would come true in more ways than he realized. Yes, it changed the way we build forever. Muddy roads and rotting wooden sidewalks gave way to smooth gray pavement, and newly cast sewer systems saved millions of lives in the deathly dirty cities of the early industrial era. Concrete, when poured over rods of steel, proved strong enough to prop up colossal skyscrapers that Julius Caesar could only have dreamed of.
But there was a trade-off: Every time Edison fired up his trademark 150-foot kilns, scorching the limestone inside into blistering pebbles of cement clinker, he released hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Yankee Stadium was built not by Babe Ruth’s swing alone, but with around 30,000 cubic yards of Edison concrete, whose creation released at least 5,400 tons of CO2, the equivalent of driving a gas-powered car 12.5 million miles, or to the moon and back more than two dozen times. But this is nothing compared with the roughly 30 billion tons of concrete the world now uses each year, enough to have turned the gluey gray goo into the second-most used material on Earth. (The first is water. Glug glug.)
The Anthropocene has been built atop a foundation of concrete, its weight eclipsing the biomass of all living things, and its annual carbon tab responsible for up to 8 percent of global emissions, the equivalent of the entire country of India. Critically, unlike the astonishingly enduring remnants of Rome, our modern concrete decays quickly, so it must be repoured time and time again, which only makes it more environmentally catastrophic.
But it doesn’t have to be this way, not anymore.
“The future of concrete is to think differently, to go away from claiming that cement is bad,” Masic told me. “Our goal is to turn this around and make concrete part of the solution instead of being a problem.”
This is why we can have nice concrete
Per ton, concrete actually emits far less CO2 by volume than other materials like aluminum, steel, plastic, or glass.
The problem is that we use so much of it, even a slightly negative footprint can quickly become enormous. But “the upside is,” said Sabbie Miller, a professor at UC Davis who focuses on sustainable concrete, “if you’re able to come up with some small change, then those small changes will also scale” in ways “that could have a huge effect on modern society and its burdens on the environment.”
One of those solutions takes a cue from the Romans, who made concrete differently than we do today. Their once-mysterious method ensured that hulking structures like the Colosseum or the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct built during Augustus’ reign and still in use today, could survive for millennia while New York City’s Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or the Washington Bridge crumble after just a few decades of use.
It’s not just that we drive cars over our concrete freeways while the Colosseum has been mostly free of even the bulkiest chariot wheels for millennia. The answer, according to Masic’s research, lies in the Romans’ ingenious recipe for cement, the glue that binds concrete together. When the ancients brewed a batch of cement, they left big white chunks of dormant lime in the final mixture. Later, if a crack formed, any water would react with the idle lime, filling the fissure with new stone. Our modern concrete has no such lime clasts, meaning that if water seeps into a crack, it degrades the structure from within, rusting the rebar that made our big towers possible, leading to a grim condition known as “concretecancer.”
Masic has recently turned his research into a startup called DMAT that reserves unreacted lime in concrete, giving it self-healing properties he says could extend a structure’s lifespan by about 50 percent, which in and of itself would reduce its carbon footprint by 40 percent. If the construction industry normalized such concrete or other mixtures that emit, say, half as much CO2 as usual, it would keep hundreds of millions of tons of it out of the atmosphere each year.
But why stop there? Some startups have gotten much better in recent years at producing concrete capable of quite literally breathing in more CO2 than it emits in a process that takes advantage of concrete’s natural porousness. It could, in theory, turn our cities into concrete rainforests by turning the material into a storage reservoir. As Miller put it, “what if we can use our concrete to undo some of our environmental damages that we’ve already caused?”
In the Bahamas, the startup Partanna has already built what it’s called the world’s first carbon net-negative home, an unassuming 1,250-square-foot abode that the company claims will sequester 182.6 tons of CO2 in its lifetime, the equivalent of hundreds of trees. Meanwhile, Masic’s lab has been piloting ways to turn concrete into a giant battery, capable of storing solar power during the day and releasing it at night, a green innovation that could cancel out its own carbon footprint within a few years of use.
Masic believes that electroconductivity could be key to catalyzing a new era of concrete — more so even than his neo-Roman ventures. “It might hold the secret,” he said, “for turning a bad guy into something amazing.”
But as promising as these innovations are, it will take time for them to ripple out from model homes and into the concrete that actually surrounds us. American concrete startups have lost billions of dollars in federal funding and expected procurement contracts under the Trump administration. Some states, most notably California, are helping to pick up the slack, but investment still lags behind potential. There’s also the challenge of convincing builders running on paper thin margins that their old ways of doing things might fit better in a new mould.
But concrete’s staggering scale means that we can’t afford to keep pouring it without considering its ugly trade-offs. More importantly, perhaps, we can’t afford to miss out on the opportunity that such a mammoth, transformative material presents to change everything yet again.
BRUSSELS — Slovakia is reviving a dormant cooperation forum with Moscow, putting Russia’s gas and oil supplies, nuclear fuel and the treatment of Russian athletes high on the agenda of their first such meeting in five years, according to a Russian government note obtained by POLITICO.
The note, written by Russian Science and Higher Education Minister Valery Falkov, says Slovak Foreign Minister Juraj Blanár agreed during an Aug. 20 video call to hold a meeting of the Russian-Slovak Intergovernmental Commission in Moscow.
Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico said Wednesday the meeting is scheduled for Nov. 25. The Russian note — which is dated Sept. 10 — initially set the date of the meeting as Oct. 26-27.
The IGC, which covers economic, scientific and technical cooperation, has been dormant since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The last meeting was the commission’s 21st session, held in Bratislava on Nov. 12, 2021.
The meeting comes as Moscow finds openings in other international arenas. The U.S. has invited Vladimir Putin to December’s G20 summit in Miami, while the International Olympic Committee has provisionally lifted its suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee and urged sports bodies to ease restrictions on Russian athletes.
Asked about the purported agenda for the IGC, the Slovak foreign ministry directed POLITICO to Blanár’s public statements after the Aug. 20 call. “We pursue a policy in all directions and maintain dialogue with all countries that are interested in pragmatic cooperation with us for the benefit of the Slovak Republic’s national interests,” Blanár said at the time.
The Russian foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
The renewed push for warmer Slovak-Russian relations follows Fico’s May 9 visit to Moscow, where he met Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during Victory Day commemorations. It comes after Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary’s April election, which cost Putin one of his closest partners in Europe and forced him to look elsewhere for EU allies.
Months before losing the election to Péter Magyar, Orbán rebooted the Russian-Hungarian Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation, which had been suspended for several years after the 2022 invasion. Magyar’s government did not confirm to POLITICO whether the commission would go ahead next year.
EU leaders, including Fico, will gather in Brussels on Thursday for a two-day summit focused on issues including energy prices and support for Ukraine, with the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expected to join them for a conversation on Friday.
Oil imports and cultural integration
In the August video call, Blanár raised Slovakia’s opposition to the EU’s phaseout of Russian gas imports and asked to discuss supplies at the Moscow meeting, according to the document, which POLITICO could not independently verify but bears the hallmarks of a legitimate Russian ministerial note. Slovak representatives also stressed the importance of continued Russian oil deliveries through the Druzhba pipeline and welcomed regular shipments of nuclear fuel for Slovak power plants, according to the note.
Slovakia remains heavily reliant on Russian oil and gas, and Fico has argued that ending imports would raise costs. When the two leaders met in Moscow on May 9, Putin said Russia would do everything to meet Slovakia’s energy needs.
The agenda for the meeting next month reaches beyond energy, according to the document. The sides plan to explore working groups on culture, tourism, agriculture and environmental protection, and to discuss the status of the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Bratislava.
Falkov also records Blanár’s opposition to what the note calls the “discrimination against Russian athletes” at international competitions, noting the issue is to be discussed at the IGC meeting.
The International Olympic Committee lifted the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee in July and said its previous recommendations restricting Russian athletes’ participation no longer applied. World Archery lifted restrictions on Russian athletes and officials in August. FIFA President Gianni Infantino has also called for Russia to be allowed back into international football.
The approach echoes Moscow’s recent effort to lock in closer ties with Orbán’s Hungary. Budapest and Moscow in December agreed on a 12-point plan to expand cooperation in areas including energy, trade and culture. The plan was signed by then Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko after talks in Moscow in December. The Slovak note points to a similar breadth of ambition.
The Kremlin’s outreach to Fico shows how Moscow can use energy ties to pull individual EU countries away from a united stance on Ukraine. Putin made a similar pitch in Washington last weekend: After a call with the Russian leader, President Donald Trump said Russia would supply diesel to U.S. and global markets to bring down fuel prices. The deal would provide revenue to Moscow while weakening efforts to maintain a united front against the Kremlin.
But there are questions over whether Putin can follow through on his pledge to Trump. Ukraine has been stepping up drone strikes on Russian refineries, aiming to disrupt fuel supplies and cut revenue for Moscow’s war effort. Kyiv said this month that strikes had disabled 51 percent of Russia’s oil-refining capacity.
BRUSSELS — European leaders came for the budget. They’re staying for everything else.
A two-day European Council starting Thursday was supposed to be all about the money. Instead, leaders of the 27 EU member countries are heading into one of their most crowded summits in years, with a succession of geopolitical crises threatening to hijack the EU’s carefully laid plans.
European Council President António Costa originally wanted the gathering to accelerate negotiations on the bloc’s next seven-year budget, hoping to seal a deal before elections in France, Italy and Poland in 2027 make an already difficult agreement even harder.
But the world had other plans. Soaring energy prices, tensions with China, Russia’s war in Ukraine (and U.S. President Donald Trump’s ambiguity over it), migration and turmoil in the Middle East have all elbowed their way onto the agenda.
The result is a two-day marathon covering virtually every major challenge facing the EU, from keeping European factories competitive to ensuring the world’s most important shipping lanes stay open.
For anyone trying to follow the action without spending 48 hours glued to Brussels, here’s your guide to what matters.
With the usual warning: EU leaders are notorious for letting discussions drag on or reshuffling the agenda — that’s what our liveblog is for.
Thursday at dawn: The pre-match warm-up
Before the summit even starts, Europe’s political families will gather at the crack of dawn.
The European People’s Party meets from 7:30 a.m. at the Sofitel Brussels Europe — the place to be if you can get in, given how many center-right leaders will be at the summit table.
The Socialists gather from 8:30 a.m. at PES headquarters, with Costa, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen expected.
Renew kicks off at 8 a.m. at the Palais d’Egmont, with French President Emmanuel Macron and top EU diplomat Kaja Kallas among those expected.
Even without leaders in the summit room, the far-right Patriots got a head start Wednesday, with Marine Le Pen delivering a scathing attack on the state of the EU.
Thursday morning: The energy blame game and China
Leaders kick off with discussions on Europe’s struggle for economic competitiveness, starting with energy — potentially the most politically explosive debate.
Governments want immediate relief from soaring energy prices as a result of the war in Iran, and will push the Commission to introduce new measures on top of the wide-ranging but somewhat toothless package it announced back in March.
Expect finger-pointing between capitals and Brussels over who should act, and for climate policies like the upcoming Emissions Trading System on heating and transport to come under fire.
Next comes China. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will brief leaders on efforts to tackle the EU’s enormous trade imbalance with Beijing, following trade chief Maroš Šefčovič’s negotiations with Chinese officials.
Leaders are expected to renew their demand for Brussels to “urgently” tool up with further trade defenses to prevent further deindustrialization of the bloc and to shield further industrial sectors from Chinese competition.
There’s also time for the familiar fight over EU red tape, with calls for Brussels to stop legislating.
The positions are well known: The self-styled “modernists” — essentially the old frugals in disguise — want to contain costs, while countries benefiting from EU spending are determined to defend their allocations, under the less glamorous banner of “friends of cohesion.” Positions on new EU-wide taxes are similarly entrenched.
But the real story is timing.
Governments have watered down a commitment to secure an agreement by December, according to draft conclusions seen by POLITICO. Costa wants a deal before a series of high-stakes elections in 2027 complicate negotiations; capitals fear a deadline could weaken their bargaining power.
Most importantly, Costa is moving into the driving seat as budget talks enter their most politically sensitive stage. Watch for clues about a possible extraordinary summit in late November — and whether December remains a credible deadline or leaders quietly start preparing for negotiations to spill into 2027.
Thursday dinner: Making room for new members
Over dinner, leaders will tackle enlargement and the EU reforms needed to accommodate new members — after all, October’s summit has historically been devoted to the bloc’s hopefuls.
Montenegro is edging closer to completing accession negotiations, while progress elsewhere raises questions about whether the bloc is institutionally and financially ready to grow.
The Commission has outlined proposals to prepare the EU for enlargement, and leaders will discuss how internal reforms should accompany the accession process. Watch for a positive signal to Montenegro and commitments on reforming the bloc itself.
Friday morning: Ukraine’s wish list
The second day begins with Ukraine and an expected appearance by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Declarations of European solidarity are all but guaranteed. The more interesting question is what leaders are actually prepared to do.
Kyiv needs air defense systems, interceptors and financing as Russian attacks intensify. Leaders could discuss tougher action against Moscow’s shadow fleet and visa restrictions for Russians. And while EU financing for Ukraine has already been agreed for 2026, the country’s needs beyond that remain an increasingly pressing issue.
Could this mean reopening the debate on using frozen Russian assets to plug future funding gaps? That remains a question mark — although no immediate breakthrough is expected.
Friday pre-lunch: Defense and three dangerous waterways
Before breaking for lunch, leaders will turn to Russian hybrid attacks, maritime security and the Middle East.
In the Black Sea, recent attacks on civilian shipping threaten Ukraine’s crucial grain export route. Turkey has floated new protected shipping corridors, while countries including Romania and Bulgaria are pushing to give the issue more attention.
Will leaders back concrete measures or stop at condemnation? That’s the question.
Discussions then turn to the Middle East and two other critical shipping routes: the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. The fallout from the Iran–U.S. war, increased Iranian attacks around Hormuz and renewed Houthi threats in the Red Sea have disrupted global trade and energy flows.
The EU’s Aspides naval mission is short of vessels, and Kallas wants governments to contribute more. Watch whether leaders put ships behind their promises.
The broader Middle East discussion will also touch on Iran, Yemen, the West Bank and Lebanon.
Friday lunch: The migration showdown
Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen are worth watching as leaders discuss migration over lunch, following the crisis in Spain’s North African exclave of Ceuta.
Irregular arrivals have been declining, but disagreements remain over border crises, solidarity and tougher migration controls.
And with an election looming in Spain on Nov. 29, this could be Sánchez’s last tango — and a final chance to defend his government’s handling of the crisis while venting his frustration over the lack of European solidarity.
Watch whether the debate produces agreement or another political clash, as happened last time.
Bonus: Two pressers are better than one
With such a packed agenda, leaders won’t wait until the end of the summit for the usual joint press conference by von der Leyen and Costa. An additional one is planned for Thursday, after the budget debate.
On Thursday, watch Costa’s language on the budget deadline and whether von der Leyen offers any concrete measures on energy prices.
On Friday, look for promises of additional support for Ukraine, whether commitments on maritime security come with actual ships and resources — and commentary on how the migration showdown over lunch went.
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