On the Transition to Clean Energy: Heedlessly Modest, Hardly Draconian

Spurred on by the myriad inventions from the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the related consumer demand for the conveniences, the Industrial Revolution itself played a major role in what would come to be known as global warming or climate change. In 2015, the Paris Agreement stipulated, notably without any enforcement, a global temperature rise of 1.5C as a ceiling. Just a decade later, scientists were saying that the threshold would be exceeded. Even amid the searing heat in the E.U. during the summer of 2026, the fear around the world in halls of government was less oriented to the what the new normal climatically would bring than to whether Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz, which was known as an oil checkpoint through which over 20 billion barrels of oil were being transported per day. It was as though our species no longer had any control over how far global warming would go.

Just after that summer, “the UN warmed that it is no longer possible to keep global warming below 1.5C.”[1] Simon Steill, of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), pointed to what he called the “spiralling costs of the climate crisis caused by humanity’s addiction to burning coal, oil, and gas.”[2] A report by Climate Central had recently “found that nearly nine in 10 Europeans experienced a month’s worth of ‘risky heat’ during the June-August period, making [Europe] the most ‘unusually hot place on the planet.’”[3] Whether from this, or that “hundreds of millions [of people were] impacted across Asia and Africa,” or the “relentless record-breaking temperatures in North America,” it was clear, at least to Kristina Dahl at Climate Central “that “human-driven warning is pushing communities beyond safe physical limits.”[4] The Paris Agreement had not plucked 1.5C arbitrarily out of a hat; that governments had not taken the threshold seriously enough in terms of quickly shifting from fossil fuels to clean sources of energy was already taken a noticeable toll on the species. As the E.U. was warming at double that of the planet as a whole in 2026, a report by the UN Environment projected “a best-case 1.8C of warming and over 2C in other scenarios. ‘Overshoot, peak and decline’ is now our best bet,’” the report states.[5] Electorates and government officials around the world had not stepped up to the (baseball) plate to make hard political choices, and the parts-per-million of carbon in the atmosphere were still increasing as if there had not been an agreement in Paris in 2015.

Even though in 2025, “wind and solar generated more EU electricity than fossil fuels for the first time, marking a major milestone in the transition to clean power . . . green power only [met] around 40 per cent of the increase in [energy] demand” due in part to “energy-intensive air conditioning and the boom in artificial intelligence.”[6] That same year, a consultant with BP told a small group at Yale that even with the increased use of clean energy sources worldwide, the year’s increase in the demand for energy was greater.

At the very end of the summer of 2026, U.S. President announced that the U.S. had majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven Venezuelan oil reserves. The deal was oriented to reducing the price of gas for Americans; the supply disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz had driven up the global price of oil, and Americans were paying the price in driving and flying. Lower oil and gas prices would translate into more demand for and use of fossil fuels, and thus more carbon emissions; an even warmer atmosphere and oceans could be expected. The deal marks a clear divergence from the urging by scientists that the world should transition as much and as soon as possible to clean energy. That summer had showed Europeans and even the world hearing of heat wave after heat wave in the E.U. just what putting off a transition that would at least cover the annual increase in the world’s energy demand looks like.

It would be ironic were the large and increasing energy-draw from AI computing and data-storage putting our species’ survival at risk. Securing access to more oil and building AI data-centers as if they were popcorn represent gross negligence, given the “intel” coming out of the UN and Climate Central in 2026. As a species, we can develop technology by leaps and bounds, adding great convenience and sheer fun to living, but if our species goes extinct, the fruits of our innovativeness will be for naught as our descendants struggle to survive or die outright at some generation. The summer of 2026 suggests that the bill from our species’ penchant for instant energy-gratification was already coming due, and yet more AI centers were being built especially in the U.S., and President Trump scored a lot more oil for the American consumers, whose sight was narrowly fixed on the weekly price increases at the pump and to fly.  

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1. Liam Gilliver, “Europe Was the ‘Most Unusually Hot Place on the Planet’ This Summer. Can Renewables Cool Us Down?” Euronews.com, 17 September, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid. “Researchers defined ‘risky heat’ as days that were hotter than 90 per cent of what a local area experienced between 1991 and 2020 for this time of year, representing the point at which health risks from extreme heat begins to rise.” This metric may, however, be flawed with respect to the E.U.’s northern states such as Finland and Sweden because of their relatively low 1991-2020 bases. Being hotter than those may not be so hot for the human body, whereas hotter than the bases in the E.U. states of Greece and Spain could be expected to have adverse biological impacts. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

The E.U. on Chinese Online Marketplaces: Different Business Cultures

It is perhaps just human nature to assume that the attitude towards ethical (and unethical) business is uniform from culture to culture around the world, with one's own culture being definitive and thus the default as a standard. But just as far-away cultures can be very different than one's own, so too can far-off business practitioners and even regulators have different beliefs, values and thus expectations concerning how ethical business norms should be than do such people in one's own culture. The E.U./China trade interface provides a case in point. 

In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith does not exclude a role for government in regulating markets and addressing the externalities of market competition. The emphasis lies in maintaining competitive markets and making up for any societal costs, such as unemployment and even homelessness. What about “mopping up” unethical business practices to protect consumers? Is there a role for government here or is “buyer beware” sufficient because competition in a market will put unethical suppliers out of business? A business strategy of stealth and denial can delay the accrual of negative reputational capital, especially if the pool of potential and likely buyers is not stagnant. The management of a coffee house or lunch place near a large university, for instance, can get away with a lot of unsavory practices without the annual incoming crowd having any knowledge of the sordid mentality of the management or its rogue retail employees. Similarly, nonsupervisory, uneducated employees working at a major retail company’s customer-service telephone room can get away with lying even in telling aggrieved customers, “The managers here don’t talk with customers” and even “We don’t have supervisors in this department.” This assumes that an automated answering “menu” even has an option to speak with a live person rather than with AI, which may not grasp the concept, complaint. Nietzsche’s claim that the will to power is the primary motive even for weak people who are like herd animals and so cannot master their own instinctual urge to dominate applies in spades to retail phone-banks, even at least in appearances to AI answering-machines. The unilateral, even rogue “power trips,” or power-aggrandizement, whether by an actual, small employee or a human-programmed AI phone-system (i.e., machine learning applied to a switch-board), give rise to emotional harm and thus are unethical because such treatment is not justified, especially to paying customers. Paying to be dominated is perhaps another line of business beyond the reach of the present topic. In a competitive market, presumably companies with rude, even hostile customer-service employees get enough of a negative reputation that even repeat customers eventually go elsewhere, but what if rude customer service is the norm in a given industry? A new potential supplier may not be motivated financially to enter the market based on customer-service as the primary basis of competitive advantage. Of course, the intentional (or, looking the other way) sale of illegal, unsafe, and counterfeit products can benefit from the deceit, especially on e-commerce platforms. Furthermore, if unethical business practices are the norm in the host country of such a seller but not where the customers are located, the reputation may be too light for sufficient notice to be taken by potential (and repeat) customers for them to buy from other sellers. This differential, and the typical erroneous assumption that the business ethics in one’s own culture is universal around the world and therefore one is not vulnerable to extremely unscrupulous sellers elsewhere, may be behind the €550 million fine that the E.U. slapped on AliExpress, an online marketplace based in China, on 20 July, 2026.

Even though I have no data to suggest that business practitioners in China were generally less ethical than their counterparts in the E.U., both the magnitude of the fine and the broadness and substance of the Commission’s accusation that AliExpress managers had failed “to adequately assess and mitigate risks linked to the sale of illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products” may be indicative of a very unethical business culture, not only in the company, but also in the general business culture in China.[1]  It may have been that at least as of 2026, even blatant unethical conduct was considered as a regular part of doing business in China, as in the statement, everyone here sells counterfeit. Two years prior, the E.U. Commission had “found that AliExpress failed to establish an effective system to detect and remove illegal products, while underestimating the gap between the number of human moderators available and the scale of the workload.”[2] Failure to establish a system that worked can be interpreted as an active decision to allow, or tolerate, illegal products on the “selves.” So too can the intentional understaffing of monitors in the company. The management need not have admitted to the mentality, for it is possible that its fingerprints were all over the choices actually taken by the managers. The “platform’s product compliance checks were also found to be vulnerable to abuse, with malicious traders allegedly misclassifying products to exploit less stringent requirements.”[3] Establishing an insufficient number of checks can itself be interpreted as being too comfortable with product-negligence and even the existence of malicious sellers. That “large volumes of illegal products—including unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics—continued to circulate on AliExpress despite moderation efforts, in some cases remaining online for weeks after being flagged” may point to a managerial acceptance of squalid sellers on the marketplace platform.[4] In fact, the E.U. found “that AliExpress failed to properly enforce its penalty policy, allowing stores selling illegal products to remain active on the platform even after receiving sanctions” as if they would suddenly reverse an unethical mentality and organizational culture.[5] Sellers were even “able to bypass safeguards and list fake products” because the company’s brand authorization system “was deemed ineffective and insufficiently robust to stop abuse.”[6] Even the company’s public statement that the company had invested a lot in risk assessment and mitigation, product safety and consumer protection does not touch on how those investments were used, or even whether they were in fact used sufficiently. In fact, spending a lot of money can act as a smoke screen. The failure to acknowledge lapses can itself be viewed as unethical, or at least as not serious. In other words, mendacity can be like smoke indicative of a hidden fire if unethical people are habitually so, especially in covering up their own unethical decisions. Confessions are not necessary.

A company’s foreign direct-investment renders a foreign country’s beliefs and values concerning business ethics (and integrity in general) relevant. Even international trade—even at arm’s length—can cause two different ethics cultures to clash. The people in the more ethical business culture may be vulnerable to worse, and thus unforeseen or unanticipated, unethical practices such as selling illegal or counterfeit products under false pretenses (i.e., lying) rather than merely charging too much or having rude, power-hungry, or product/policy-incompetent customer-service employees.  To be sure, the latter two unethical practices are worthy of disrepute, but then how much more severe, and thus indicative, are the former two. As an admittedly rouge gauge, the difference between the ethical norms in the E.U.’s business sector and those in China’s can be grasped. Cultures around the world can be said to differ even substantially in terms of tolerance for unethical volition, mentality, and conduct and thus societal expectations for ethical conduct. A very large fine may be a quantifiable indication that two cultures differ substantially.

To go beyond compensation, the matter of whether as a penalty such a fine can actually change, or uplift, the relatively sordid business culture by somehow incentivizing practitioners in it to behave honorably rather than continuing with corner-cutting expediency seems too idealistic, and thus unrealistic because humans tend to be habitual creatures in conduct and mentalities are not likely to change, given their sheer gravitas, especially if they are oriented to sneaking around a new barrier. A river’s dam that has many holes is not likely to fix itself. Accordingly, the Commission would be wise to set fines as compensation for all of the harm to European consumers, rather than to teach the Chinese a lesson in order to mold Chinese business after European business. To be sure, the temptation to penalize and manipulate towards one’s own culture can be very strong, but being realistic can work wonders in satiating the desire to mold others who are different in one’s own image. Knowing the otherness of the other, for example, and publicizing this domestically in the E.U., could potentially do a lot to facilitate the mechanism of market competition in the weeding out of the squalid sellers in China by informed European consumers. The Commission has a loud-speaker with which to more closely link a company’s reputational capital to the actual business practices that may even be hidden from view.

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1. Vincenzo Genovese, “EU Slaps €550 Million Fine on AliExpress over Illegal and Counterfeit Goods,” Euronews.com, 20 July, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

COP30: Is Symbolism Enough Amid Climate-Change?

With the U.S. fed up and only 100 governments left willing to attend COP30 in Brazil on combatting carbon-emissions and the related global warming, the question of whether the basis of the annual conference, voluntary compliance, is sufficient and thus should be enabled by the staged meetings. Even to continue to have the conferences annually can be viewed as part of a broader state of denial, given that the 1.5C degree maximum for the planet’s warming set at the Paris conference a decade earlier was by 2025 universally acknowledged by scientists to no longer be realistic; the target would almost certainly be surpassed. It is in this context that any progress from COP30 should be placed.

At the end of the pre-COP30 meetings, the “European Union and Brazil launched an appeal calling on other nations to recognize carbon pricing as a pragmatic way to cut emissions and fun the green transition.”[1] Crucially, the “declaration . . . is a symbolic way to encourage world nations to develop strategies and establish markets akin to the EU’s emissions trading scheme, ETS, in place since 2005. Under the ETS, the EU makes companies pay for the emissions they produce.”[2] Below the nice headline of the declaration and assurances of “partnerships” lies the key word, symbolic. To characterize countries as partners is already a red flag, for that is weaker than even alliances, which can be broken at a moment’s notice with impunity.

Immediately after the “declaration” was made public, critics were saying “that putting the spotlight on carbon pricing could divert attention from real emissions-cutting, like investing in restoring natural carbon sinks, like forests and oceans.”[3] Even in putting “real emissions-cutting” in terms of restoring forests and oceans—COP30 ironically being held near the increasingly deforested Amazon rain-forest—minimizes the urgency in staving off warming from greatly exceeding 1.5C degrees. Real decreases in carbon-emissions were needed, and yet only 100 national governments were meeting in Brazil to consider voluntary action at the country-level.

The elephant in the living room, invisible to almost everyone, is the assumption that voluntary decisions by national governments in the face of economic and political immediate costs can be relied upon to solve the problem, even when it was clear in 2025 that the 1.5C degree maximum “decided” at the COP15 in Paris would be surpassed. Like the tremendous risk of destruction to the species from nuclear war, which the belligerence of the Russian and Israeli governments for two years as of 2025 means that the irrational decision to unleash nuclear weapons is not at all unrealistic, the risk to the species’ very survival from climate change justifies the establishment of a world federation with just enough governmental sovereignty, backed up militarily, to push back against wayward national governments in order to keep the worst of human nature from being unleashed with hitherto unimaginable ferocity and mass destructiveness. Anyone with the irrational fear that such a world federation, which Kant recommends in his writings, would produce the Anti-Christ might want to look at the Russians in Ukraine and the Israelis in Gaza as of 2025 for a clue as to where in the tiered system evil has already been manifest. Stalin and Hitler provide easy examples from the twentieth century.

In short, symbolic international conferences and absolute national-sovereignty should no longer be relied on so much by our species if it hopes not to go extinct. If that does happen, the wound would almost certainly be self-inflicted. Yet even then, with blood dripping from the knife being held by our species, still word of the deed will not have reached us. As Nietzsche writes of the unconscious discrediting of God (which Nietzsche opposed, for he was not an atheist), word of the deed did not reach the culprits, as in light from a far star not having reached Earth yet and yet the explosion has already happened. So too, our species has been oblivious concerning what is sufficient to stave off the destruction even of the species itself. The human mind discounts even mass-destructive possibilities that are thought to be low-probability and far off in the future, and thus flinches from agreeing to set up adequate safeguards.

In issuing the warning here with an acknowledgement of utter futility, I may be writing only to future descendants who are already dead. I am time, the destroyer of worlds, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna in the Hinduism’s Bhagavad-Gita. Left to its own devices by a feckless, stubborn, and greedy species, time may indeed see the extinction of homo sapiens, the “wise” species of Man, while the gods laugh at our primped-up seriousness as if we had been children pretending to be adults. Pathetically, we even take ourselves to be adults as we marvel at our own symbolic feats.

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1. Marta Pacheco, “COP30: EU Back Global Carbon Market Alliance to Crack Down on CO2 Emissions,” Euronews.com, 10 November, 2025.
2. Ibid., italics added for emphasis.
3. Ibid.

Climate Change in Europe: On the Culpability of the Media

A report by the E.U. Copernicus Climate-Change Service in 2024 contains the finding that “Europe is the continent with the fastest-rising temperatures on Earth, having warmed twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s.”[1] In spite of “fastest-rising” and “twice as fast” are alarming expressions, no such corresponding sense of urgency had translated into a political will capable of pushing through game-changing legislation and regulations in the European Union. The short-term financial interests of industry, cost-conscious consumers, workers not wanting to be laid off, and taxpayers would pale in comparison were a sense of emergency to take hold the domain of politics. “Weak” states (i.e., governments) that are not willing or even able to resist short-term political pressures from an electorate exacerbate the problem even in the midst of climate change, which scientists decades earlier had predicted would really begin to move the needle on air-temperatures globally in the 2020s (and just wait until the oceans become saturated with CO₂!). You ain’t seen nothin yet may be the mantra for the 2030s.

It seems to be a case of the proverbial oblivious frog in gradually yet steadily warming water in a cooking pan on a stove, as the editors at journalistic media companies have been orienting their news to reporting on specific climate-related events that are disasters only in particular locales and thus do not point explicitly to global warming. For instance, on 4 July, 2025, a wildfire in the E.U. state of Greece “prompted evacuations in coastal areas south of Athens” and mobilized “75 firefighters, including five elite ground teams . . . alongside fire engines, volunteers, four helicopters, and two aircraft” as well as municipal water trucks.[2] “(O)ngoing heatwaves, drought and strong winds” kept the fire-risk high in the area.[3] Only at the end of Euronews’ article on the fire is climate change mentioned, and then only as an attenuating factor: “While fires are common in the area, experts say climate change is exacerbating them.”[4] That is to say: Oh, by the way, the warming of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans is in play here. Even as climate change is relegated thusly, that it is only exacerbating wildfires in the southern states such as Greece is a way of deflating claims that climate change ought to be handled as an emergency in terms of public policy. The media has thus been culpable.  

1. David O’Sullivan, “Firefighters Battle Wildfires in Greece and Turkey, Prompting Evacuations and Emergency Response,” Euronews.com, July 4, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

Deficiencies in the E.U. Capital Markets: A Silver Lining

With the IMF reducing its forecast of E.U.[1] economic growth for 2015 by 0.2% to 1.2 percent, E.C.B. officials still intent to go ahead with the much-anticipated “quantitative easing” program (i.e., buying state bonds), and, the euro having recently fallen 12% against the U.S. dollar since peaking, and crude oil prices below $60 a barrel in January, the limited scale of the E.U.’s capital markets relative to their American counterparts exacerbated the E.U.’s blight. Most directly, the lack of diversification on the types of capital markets meant that the focus on the bonds issued by state governments would continue.[2] With an upcoming election in the state of Greece making stock markets jittery due to the risk that the state might default on its bonds, the precarious condition of a relatively undiversified capital market added, albeit subtly, to the sense of risk in the air. Having had years to develop alternative markets since the financial crisis, E.U. policy makers had no one to blame but themselves—it would seem. However, a bright spot in European culture or society may be responsible for the lack of development.

The size of the corporate bond market was at the time just 34% of the American counterpart as a proportion of GDP, according to New Financial, a think tank in London.[3] The E.U.’s leveraged loan and securitization markets were 19% and 17% the size of their U.S. counterparts, and the venture capital market was just 15 percent, again all in terms relative to GDP.[4] Because the respective U.S. counterparts dwarf the E.U. markets by such an amazing extent in terms of GDP, part of the explanation may involve different business cultures with respect to debt.

With the U.S. federal debt at nearly $18 trillion and the previous year still showing a deficit of over $400 billion, and almost a third of student loans in default, it is easy to view Europeans as relatively debt-averse even if the post-financial-crisis years of debt-weary states (i.e, the “PIGS”) present an image to the contrary. I suspect that the relative skepticism on debt is in turn a manifestation of European society being less infatuated with business and thus less reflective of its culture. Put another way, the positive connotation that leverage (i.e., using borrowing in productive investment to hopefully capture more of the returns than is possible in the case of stock-issuance capital financing) has in the business world has been more salient in American society than in its European counterpart. Considering the misuse of debt-financing in the American and European housing markets that led to the financial crisis in 2008, the relative size of the European capital markets as of 2015 has a silver lining.

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[1] Specifically, for the part of the E.U. that uses the euro currency.

[2] Simon Nixon, “A Continent in Need of Greater Capital Markets,” The Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2015.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

Justice as Fairness: Greece’s Bond-Holder Holdouts

In the wake of the agreement whereby private holders of Greek debt would swap the bonds and take a 75% loss, two or three percent of the private holders—namely, well-financed hedge funds including Aurelius Capital and Elliott Associates—were thought to be mulling over holding out for full pay-outs instead of agreeing to take the loss. Greece’s dilemma would have been to pay them in full in order to avoid a default and face the ire of the holders who took the losses, or risk default by invoking a collective bargaining law to force the holdouts to swap their bonds.

The full essay is in Essays on the E.U. Political Economy, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

Justice as Fairness: Writing Down Greek Debt

In 2012, 80% of Greece’s private creditors agreed to “voluntarily” convert their Greek debt into debt of a bit less than half the face-value (plus a lower interest rate). With such a proportion having agreed to the swap without triggering credit default swap insurance payouts, Greece could get the E.U. to agree to force the remaining 20% to involuntary write-downs. That would trigger the credit default swaps, at least in theory.

Because any write down of Greek debt by other E.U. states or the E.U.’s central bank (equivalent to the Federal Reserve) would be tantamount to additional aid to Greece, the E.U.’s basic law would again need to be amended (which must be unanimous). So the E.U. (and the international IMF) exempted themselves even as they pushed for “voluntary” write downs by private debt-holders. This hardly seems fair. Moreover, any pressure from the E.U. could have been sufficient for the credit default swaps to be triggered. To be truly voluntary, the write downs would have to have come from the private bondholders themselves rather than from governmental pressure. Even so, that 80% agreed, it is only fair that the remaining 20% be forced to capitulate. Otherwise, holding out could be a strategic competitive advantage financially. Refusing to compromise while other similar parties do is unfair whether between private creditors or governments.

In my view, Greece should have secured the E.U.’s approval on instituting the collective bargaining statute in order to get all of the state’s private holders of Greek bonds to take a write down. It would have triggered the credit default swap insurance claims, so the bondholders might actually have preferred being forced even if more of their Greek debt was written off. Furthermore, E.U. officials should have subjected the E.U. states to join the private bondholders. At the time of the 80% voluntary agreement in 2012, Greek debt in 2020 was forecasted to be at 120% of Greece’s total economic activity.[1] This is still quite high, particularly given the recessionary impact of the continued Greek austerity. Unfortunately, the (excessive) power of state officials at the E.U. level meant that a conflict of interest interfered with amending the E.U.’s basic law to permit the state governments and the ECB to take write downs.

In terms of ethical theory, one could apply John Rawls’ Theory of Justice here. In this theory, there is a veil of ignorance concerning where one will be in the system for which one is making rules. Not knowing whether one would represent a government or private bondholder, for example, one would not be likely to add the rule in which only the private bondholders write off their Greek bonds. Not knowing which E.U. state one would represent, one would not add a rule favoring Germany and France over Greece. Not knowing whether one is an official of the E.U. Commission or a member of a state legislature such as the Bundestag, one would not make a rule allowing the states to protect their interests at the expense of the E.U. Rawls adds that because of the veil, any rule would see to it that the position of the least well situated is improved. So it would not be the case that Germany could dictate to the E.U. or so successfully protect German interests at the expense of Greece. Indeed, the bias would be in seeing that the people least well off in the least well off state are not further downtrodden as a result of any proposed rule. This might be part of Rawls penchant for redistribution, however. At the very least, we could say that the rules enacted under justice as fairness would be in the interest of the system itself rather than any particular part thereof. In terms of the writing down of Greek debt, the E.U. could have been fairer in how it went about designing its rules. There was not exactly a veil of ignorance on the vested interests that were in a position to protect themselves at Greece’s expense.

1. Charles Forelle, Stelios Bouras, and Alkman Granitsas, “Greece Passes Key Debt Test,” The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2012.

E.U. Presses Italy to Tax Church Businesses

One of the chief benefits of federalism is the ability of one system of government to check another within the overall federal system. In the European Union, the state governments have so much power at the federal level—in the E.U. institutions—that it is difficult for the E.U. Government to check excesses and abuses in the state governments. E.U. law, regulation and directives rely on the state governments, albeit to varying extents. In the United States, the case is the reverse. The U.S. Government holds so many of the cards that the state governments cannot act to check abuses in the federal government. Actually, for all of the power that the U.S. Government has amassed, it does a horrible job in aiding citizens against abuses in their own state governments. Fortunately, we can look to Europe for a bright spot: the E.U. Commission and Italy, á grace de Mario Monti who is both governor of the state of Italy and a former commissioner in the E.U. Commission (the E.U.’s executive branch).

The full essay is at "Essays on the E.U. Political Economy," available at Amazon.