Venture capitalist Finn Murphy believes world leaders could soon resort to deflecting sunlight into space if the Earth gets unbearably hot. That’s why he’s invested more than $1 million in Stardust Solutions, a leading solar geoengineering firm that’s developing a system to reduce warming by enveloping the globe in reflective particles. Murphy isn’t rooting for climate catastrophe. But with global temperatures soaring and the political will to limit climate change waning, Stardust “can be worth tens of billions of dollars,” he said. “It would be definitely better if we lost all our money and this wasn’t necessary,” said Murphy, the 33-year-old founder of Nebular, a New York investment fund named for a vast cloud of space dust and gas. Murphy is among a new wave of investors who are putting millions of dollars into emerging companies that aim to limit the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth — while also potentially destabilizing weather patterns, food supplies and global politics. He has a degree in mathematics and mechanical engineering and views global warming not just as a human and political tragedy, but as a technical challenge with profitable solutions. Solar geoengineering investors are generally young, pragmatic and imaginative — and willing to lean into the adventurous side of venture capitalism. They often shrug off the concerns of scientists who argue it’s inherently risky to fund the development of potentially dangerous technologies through wealthy investors who could only profit if the planet-cooling systems are deployed. “If the technology works and the outcomes are positive without really catastrophic downstream impacts, these are trillion-dollar market opportunities,” said Evan Caron, a co-founder of the energy-focused venture firm Montauk Capital. “So it’s a no-brainer for an investor to take a shot at some of these.” More than 50 financial firms, wealthy individuals and government agencies have collectively provided more than $115.8 million to nine startups whose technology could be used to limit sunlight, according to interviews with VCs, tech company founders and analysts, as well as private investment data analyzed by POLITICO’s E&E News. That pool of funders includes Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s largest venture capital firms, and four other investment groups that have more than $1 billion of assets under management. Of the total amount invested in the geoengineering sector, $75 million went to Stardust, or nearly 65 percent. The U.S.-Israeli startup is developing reflective particles and the means to spray and monitor them in the stratosphere, some 11 miles above the planet’s surface. At least three other climate-intervention companies have also raked in at least $5 million. The cash infusion is a bet on planet-cooling technologies that many political leaders, investors and environmentalists still consider taboo. In addition to having unknown side effects, solar geoengineering could expose the planet to what scientists call “termination shock,” a scenario in which global temperatures soar if the cooling technologies fail or are suddenly abandoned. Still, the funding surge for geoengineering companies pales in comparison to the billions of dollars being put toward artificial intelligence. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has raised $62.5 billion in 2025 alone, according to investment data compiled by PitchBook. The investment pool for solar geoengineering startups is relatively shallow in part because governments haven’t determined how they would regulate the technology — something Stardust is lobbying to change. As a result, the emerging sector is seen as too speculative for most venture capital firms, according to Kim Zou, the CEO of Sightline Climate, a market intelligence firm. VCs mostly work on behalf of wealthy individuals, as well as pension funds, university endowments and other institutional investors. “It’s still quite a niche set of investors that are even thinking about or looking at the geoengineering space,” Zou said. “The climate tech and energy tech investors we speak to still don’t really see there being an investable opportunity there, primarily because there’s no commercial market for it today.” AEROSOLS IN THE STRATOSPHERE Stardust and its investors are banking on signing contracts with one or more governments that could deploy its solar geoengineering system as soon as the end of the decade. Those investors include Lowercarbon Capital, a climate-focused firm co-founded by billionaire VC Chris Sacca, and Exor, the holding company of an Italian industrial dynasty and perhaps the most mainstream investment group to back a sunlight reflection startup. Even Stardust’s supporters acknowledge that the company is far from a sure bet. “It’s unique in that there is not currently demand for this solution,” said Murphy, whose firm is also supporting out-there startups seeking to build robots and data centers in space. “You have to go and create the product in order to potentially facilitate the demand.” Lowercarbon partner Ryan Orbuch said the firm would see a return on its Stardust investment only “in the context of an actual customer who can actually back many years of stable, safe deployment.” Exor, another Stardust investor, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Other startups are trying to develop commercial markets for solar geoengineering. Make Sunsets, a company funded by billionaire VC Tim Draper, releases sulfate-filled weather balloons that pop when they reach the stratosphere. It sells cooling credits to individuals and corporations based on the theory that the sulfates can reliably reduce warming. There are questions, however, about the science and economics underpinning the credit system of Make Sunsets, according to the investment bank Jeffries. “A cooling credit market is unlikely to be viable,” the bank said in a May 2024 note to clients. That’s because the temperature reductions produced by sulfate aerosols vary by altitude, location and season, the note explained. And the warming impacts of carbon dioxide emissions last decades — much longer than any cooling that would be created from a balloon’s worth of sulfate. Make Sunsets didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company has previously attracted the attention of regulators in the U.S. and Mexico, who have claimed it began operating without the necessary government approvals. Draper Associates says on its website that it’s “shaping a future where the impossible becomes everyday reality.” The firm has previously backed successful consumer tech firms like Tesla, Skype and Hotmail. “It is getting hotter in the Summer everywhere,” Tim Draper said in an email. “We should be encouraging every solution. I love this team, and the science works.” THE NEXT FRONTIER One startup is pursuing space-based solar geoengineering. EarthGuard is attempting to build a series of large sunlight deflectors that would be positioned between the sun and the planet, some 932,000 miles from the Earth. The company did not respond to emailed questions. Other space companies are considering geoengineering as a side project. That includes Gama, a French startup that’s designing massive solar sails that could be used for deep space travel or as a planetary sunshade, and Ethos Space, a Los Angeles company with plans to industrialize the moon. Both companies are part of an informal research network established by the Planetary Sunshade Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for the development of a trillion-dollar parasol for the globe. The network mainly brings together collaborators on the sidelines of space industry conferences, according to Gama CEO Andrew Nutter. “We’re willing to contribute something if we realize it’s genuinely necessary and it’s a better solution than other solutions” to the climate challenge, Nutter said of the space shade concept. “But our business model does not depend on it. If you have dollar signs hanging next to something, that can bias your decisions on what’s best for the planet.” Nutter said Gama has raised about $5 million since he co-founded the company in 2020. Its investors include Possible Ventures, a German VC firm that’s also financing a nuclear fusion startup and says on its website that the firm is “relentlessly optimistic — choosing to focus on the possibilities rather than obsess over the risks.” Possible Ventures did not respond to a request for comment. Sequoia-backed Reflect Orbital is another space startup that’s exploring solar geoengineering as a potential moneymaker. The company based near Los Angeles is developing a network of satellite mirrors that would direct sunlight down to the Earth at night for lighting industrial sites or, eventually, producing solar energy. Its space mirrors, if oriented differently, could also be used for limiting the amount of sun rays that reach the planet. “It’s not so much a technological limitation as much as what has the highest, best impact. It’s more of a business decision,” said Ally Stone, Reflect Orbital’s chief strategy officer. “It’s a matter of looking at each satellite as an opportunity and whether, when it’s over a specific geography, that makes more sense to reflect sunlight towards or away from the Earth.” Reflect Orbital has raised nearly $28.7 million from investors including Lux Capital, a firm that touts its efforts to “turn sci-fi into sci-fact” and has invested in the autonomous defense systems companies Anduril and Saildrone.” Sequoia and Lux didn’t respond to requests for comment. The startup hopes to send its first satellite into space next summer, according to Stone. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, whose aerospace company already has an estimated fleet of more than 8,800 internet satellites in orbit, has also suggested using the circling network to limit sunlight. “A large solar-powered AI satellite constellation would be able to prevent global warming by making tiny adjustments in how much solar energy reached Earth,” Musk wrote on X last month. Neither he nor SpaceX responded to an emailed request for comment. DON’T CALL IT GEOENGINEERING Other sunlight-reflecting startups are entering the market — even if they’d rather not be seen as solar geoengineering companies. Arctic Reflections is a two-year-old company that wants to reduce global warming by increasing Arctic sea ice, which doesn’t absorb as much heat as open water. The Dutch startup hasn’t yet pursued outside investors. “We see this not necessarily as geo-engineering, but rather as climate adaptation,” CEO Fonger Ypma said in an email. “Just like in reforestation projects, people help nature in growing trees, our idea is that we would help nature in growing ice.” The main funder of Arctic Reflections is the British government’s independent Advanced Research and Invention Agency. In May, ARIA awarded $4.41 million to the company — more than four times what it had raised to that point. Another startup backed by ARIA is Voltitude, which is developing micro balloons to monitor geoengineering from the stratosphere. The U.K.-based company didn’t respond to a request for comment. Altogether, the British agency is supporting 22 geoengineering projects, only a handful of which involve startups. “ARIA is only funding fundamental research through this programme, and has not taken an equity stake in any geoengineering companies,” said Mark Symes, a program director at the agency. It also requires that all research it supports “must be published, including those that rule out approaches by showing they are unsafe or unworkable.” Sunscreen is a new startup that is trying to limit sunlight in localized areas. It was founded earlier this year by Stanford University graduate student Solomon Kim. “We are pioneering the use of targeted, precision interventions to mitigate the destructive impacts of heatwave on critical United States infrastructure,” Kim said in an email. But he was emphatic that “we are not geoengineering” since the cooling impacts it’s pursuing are not large scale. Kim declined to say how much had been raised by Sunscreen and from what sources. As climate change and its impacts continue to worsen, Zou of Sightline Climate expects more investors to consider solar geoengineering startups, including deep-pocketed firms and corporations interested in the technology. Without their help, the startups might not be able to develop their planet-cooling systems. “People are feeling like, well wait a second, our backs are kind of starting to get against the wall. Time is ticking, we’re not really making a ton of progress” on decarbonization, she said. “So I do think there’s a lot more questions getting asked right now in the climate tech and venture community around understanding it,” Zou said of solar geoengineering. “Some of these companies and startups and venture deals are also starting to bring more light into the space.” Karl Mathiesen contributed reporting.

European companies are still paying vastly more for energy than they would in the U.S. or China, a new analysis has found, a year after a landmark report warned inaction would condemn the continent to economic stagnation. The findings come on the anniversary of the publication of a report by former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, which found the EU was lagging behind rivals as a result of expensive power and gas, hampering firms’ competitiveness internationally. According to the new findings from the influential Center for the Study of Democracy think tank, set to be unveiled Tuesday in Washington, European countries have become more exposed to energy price shocks, with indicators surging more than fivefold in the past three years. “A year after Draghi called for stronger EU energy markets, our data shows affordability risks remain high, with retail prices still 40–70 percent above pre-crisis levels in much of Central and Eastern Europe,” said Martin Vladimirov, one of the report’s authors. Affordability is now by far the greatest threat to the EU’s energy resilience, outstripping the uncertainty created by Russia’s weaponizing of energy flows, by the climate transition and by system reliability. “It affects not only citizens’ trust, but also the capacity of businesses to compete globally,” the Center for the Study of Democracy assessment cautions. “For Europe to succeed in the next phase of its energy transition, it must ensure that clean energy is not only available, but accessible and economically viable for all.” Vulnerabilities in one domain also risk spilling over into others, adding to the major and often historical divides that already exist between EU countries, the report cautions. If the bloc fails to address the gulf between countries’ energy security, it threatens to entrench regional inequality and undermine its economic sovereignty and climate goals, it warns. In his report last September, Draghi wrote that “EU companies still face electricity prices that are 2-3 times those in the US. Natural gas prices paid are 4-5 times higher. This price gap is primarily driven by Europe’s lack of natural resources, but also by fundamental issues with our common energy market.” One key recommendation was a massive program of state and private investment in aging power grids, which experts warn are inefficient and a key source of extra costs. His inquiry called for €584 billion in additional funds for electricity infrastructure by 2030, and up to €2.29 trillion by 2050. It is unclear how much of that funding will be made available, but EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen has been tasked with planning an overhaul of Europe’s grids, to be presented later this year. However, one source of reassurance for officials will be the declining levels of exposure to geopolitical risk after efforts to diversify away from Russian oil and gas. Jørgensen has presided over the introduction of a new plan to phase out imports from the country by 2028, with new suppliers ramping up production to meet demand.

LONDON — In his first Downing Street speech, Keir Starmer promised to “deliver change.” Fourteen months on, he’s still figuring out the delivery part. The British prime minister is expected to revamp his No. 10 operation amid tumbling poll ratings and as a fraught political season gets underway. Nin Pandit, his most senior civil service aide, is being moved after 10 months to lead a new delivery team operating out of Downing Street. “Delivery” is the watchword for Starmer, who sold himself to voters as a businesslike problem-solver after years of political chaos. But several Labour officials, MPs and civil servants who spoke to POLITICO, all on condition of anonymity, questioned whether the structures Starmer has created for his major program of domestic change really are fit for purpose. Pandit is the latest in a growing list of civil servants and political aides with “delivery” in either their titles or remit. They include Liz Lloyd, Starmer’s director of policy, delivery and innovation, who works alongside Olaf Henricson-Bell, the director of the No. 10 policy unit; Pat McFadden, Starmer’s Cabinet ally and enforcer; Clara Swinson, who leads Starmer’s Mission Delivery Unit; and Michael Barber, the founder of Tony Blair’s delivery unit in 2001, who is advising the new PM.  Some officials think this big cast is a recognition that there is a problem. But some also see a cause: too many people with different ideas about getting things done. Then there is that overall vision — or lack of it (an accusation that Starmer’s allies deny vociferally). One Labour MP loyal to Starmer said: “We are like a piece of driftwood floating on the ocean looking at the view. It’s a nice view, but where are we going?”  On paper, Starmer — who returns from holiday to a flurry of activity this week — should be far more comfortable than his centrist allies such as France’s Emmanuel Macron or Germany’s Friedrich Merz. He has a huge House of Commons majority and probably won’t face an election until 2029. On the world stage, his careful diplomacy has nudged Donald Trump toward more U.K.-friendly statements on tariffs, Ukraine and Gaza. At home, though, Starmer faces populists both left and right, with Brexit veteran Nigel Farage’s Reform UK consistently ahead in the polls. Inflation has ticked up. Unpopular tax rises loom. Starmer’s backbenchers are nervous about planned welfare cuts and reforms for children with special needs. And migrants keep arriving on small boats across the English Channel. “If the first year is about stabilizing and fixing foundations, I think the next year is going to be about deep-seated reform — and then the benefits of that will come towards the end of the parliament,” Ravinder Athwal, who wrote Labour’s 2024 manifesto and left his role as an aide to Starmer in July, predicted in an interview with POLITICO’s Westminster Insider. So far, it has also meant bureaucracy. THE DELIVERY BUREAUCRATS Deep in the 19th century stone-fronted Cabinet Office lies the Mission Delivery Unit (MDU). Set up by Starmer last fall, this group of around 30 civil servants — led by Swinson, a Whitehall veteran who worked for Blair’s first delivery unit — measures progress against the PM’s “five missions” that pledged the highest growth in the G7, lower violent crime, better health and education systems, and a decarbonized electricity grid by 2030. On paper, Starmer — who returns from holiday to a flurry of activity this week — should be far more comfortable than his centrist allies such as France’s Emmanuel Macron or Germany’s Friedrich Merz. | Pool Photo by Manon Cruz via EPA Some officials argue her unit started at a disadvantage by being based in the Cabinet Office instead of No. 10 next door, making it less visible to the wider government machine. One person said at least some of the MDU’s staff began their work in the department’s basement. “I don’t know necessarily what their objective is,” said one government official. “From what I’ve seen, they kind of provide more of a monitoring service of how departments are getting on, rather than driving things from the center. But then there’s a question of whether that is the job of the policy team in No. 10.” Supporters point out the MDU was designed exactly to be this sort of monitoring service and that it was never intended to actually drive policy, which is led by Downing Street. Others were less charitable. A former government official described the MDU jokingly as “the slide pack department,” adding: “I genuinely don’t really know what they do.” A second government official complained: “The message you get from them is so fucking vague that you struggle to articulate it.”  The MDU is said to have a certain template in which departments have to submit their progress in order to be accepted. One Labour official said: “Oh my god, that fucking place. That unit is everything wrong with the civil service.”  A person who talks regularly to No. 10 said: “If the government is going to continue with missions as a thing, then it really needs to press a reset button and put a bit more oomph back under them. If the delivery unit remains where it is, as an adjunct in the Cabinet Office, away from the prime minister’s authority, then the reality of how Whitehall works is it’s never going to be given the priority it needs to actually be really pushing forward reform through the system.” TAKE IT TO THE BOARD Starmer’s “mission boards” have also come under question. These were set up with the aim of bringing in outside expertise to discuss the big hurdles facing the government. Each one is led by a Cabinet minister in charge of a mission — plus a sixth board led by Deputy PM Angela Rayner, on her pledge to build 1.5 million homes by 2029. Swinson and McFadden would customarily sit in on the meetings, though McFadden’s attendance rate has dropped off recently, said two people with knowledge of the boards. Several people who have worked with the boards argued their lack of decision-making ability has left them underpowered. The boards are “pointless,” said the first former government official quoted above: “They’re chaired by the cabinet ministers who are marking their own homework.” When more junior ministers join meetings to present their plans, they come across like a school “show-and-tell” day, the former official added. “They don’t actually achieve anything.” The person who speaks regularly to No. 10 quoted above said: “You either soup them up and make them more useful, or you put them out of their misery, quite frankly.” A second person who speaks regularly to No. 10 predicted that Starmer — who initially said he would chair the boards personally — “will have to” overhaul them. “There is a sense that the mission delivery boards aren’t working,” they added. “Pat largely doesn’t turn up to them anymore. They need to inject energy into them or rethink delivery across the PM’s priorities.” Allies of Rachel Reeves say the top finance minister is actively working on the government’s growth strategy ahead of her fall budget. | Will Oliver/EPA More broadly, civil servants do not “feel like an awful lot has changed,” said another person in regular discussions with senior officials. “It doesn’t feel like there’s been a revolution in how the government makes decisions. There were always units for how you do joined-up government … they’ve been trying to solve this for decades. This is just a different way of doing what other governments have been trying to do.” THE FINAL BOSS One element that is effective, several officials said, involves Starmer himself. Since last fall the PM has been leading regular “stock takes” with the five “mission lead” Cabinet ministers, plus Rayner, that can run for two to three hours each. He began by visiting Cabinet ministers in their own departments, though now they come to him in No. 10. There tend to be a dozen or fewer attendees, including McFadden, Barber and Swinson. The stock takes put pressure on departments to get their ducks in a row, said people with knowledge of them, and give Cabinet ministers face-time with Starmer to press their most urgent requests — including getting No. 10 to lean on other departments. “The prime minister wants” are still among the most powerful words in Whitehall. There is continuity, too. Supporters of the PM point out that the missions themselves still stand, two and a half years after Starmer unveiled them. The Cabinet ministers leading them have all remained in their jobs. Starmer’s “Plan for Change” — which attached “milestones” to the missions — is mentioned constantly in government press releases (under orders from No. 10), and the missions govern the structure of the “grid,” the weekly news planner circulated to senior communications officials. While roles as “business champions” for loyal, fresh-faced Labour backbenchers to sell the message were quietly scrapped in July, similar “mission champions” still exist. There are regional champions, as well as mission-specific ones — Rosie Wrighting on health, Dan Tomlinson on growth, Tom Hayes on net zero, and Sarah Smith on opportunity. Fellow new MP Linsey Farnsworth was the champion for tackling crime, but her role ended in the summer after she spoke out against planned welfare cuts and she has not yet been replaced, said one person with knowledge of the move. Some other Labour MPs, though, have long complained that Starmer’s overlapping missions, milestones and steps blur the message they are meant to send to the public. Events and crises can knock these long-term goals off course, too. A second former government official said: “They’ve been talking about nothing but small boats all summer.”  IT TAKES TIME These struggles should surprise no one, according to Michelle Clement, a lecturer at King’s College London who wrote “The Art of Delivery,” a study of Blair’s first delivery unit. “We’re in the equivalent of 1998,” she told POLITICO. Blair, frustrated by the pace of change on key domestic priorities, only set up his unit in 2001. Whitehall is still getting over life under five Conservative PMs in 14 years. “All of the change and churn that we saw in recent years of prime ministers does have an impact on the capacity of the state,” she added. Clement argues that Starmer has taken the right approach in creating “institutional ballast” to ensure he has people focusing on the important issues, while other staff focus on the urgent ones. Pandit will be “well-placed” to do policy delivery, she said, despite some negative briefing (denied by No. 10) to the BBC about her effectiveness. Lloyd, Clement said, was “one of the unsung heroes of the Blair years.” If Tony Blair remains the model for government delivery, No. 10 aides would do well to check out a 20 year-old debate clip still online. | Jessica Lee/EPA “People need to panic a bit less,” said a second Labour official, who argued a “huge amount” is being done but that some of it — like extending free school meals to 500,000 more children — doesn’t resonate with the Westminster bubble. Government-funded childcare hours increase from Monday, while Starmer is expected to put a renewed focus on his pledge to open hundreds of nurseries in spare school classrooms. A third Labour official said: “That’s our priority [this] week, not tittle tattle gossip.” MISSIONS: IMPOSSIBLE Others, though, question the overall direction. Starmer’s mission-led approach to government was inspired by Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at University College London who wrote “Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism.”  In an interview with POLITICO, she suggested the majority of Starmer’s five missions do not lay out clear and sufficiently direct means of changing the way the British economy works. “I don’t know what the economic strategy is, in terms of what economy we want,” she said. Mazzucato favors setting “moonshot” public sector goals that drive private investment and innovation “along the way” — just as John F. Kennedy’s pledge to land on the moon by the end of the 1960s began a chain of inventions that led to camera phones and baby formula. Mazzucato praised Labour’s net zero mission, but said overall that the party needs “a really ambitious positive strategy which resonates with people” — and that it should have had one from the start. “Growth is the result of a strategy,” she added. “So, beyond the narrative on growth, what kind of society, what kind of economy do we want? That’s not clear. I think if you asked anyone on the street, what is Labour’s strategy for the direction of economic growth — not the rate — it wouldn’t be totally clear.” Mazzucato suggested the government is thinking about delivery “in the Michael Barber way” of Blair’s first unit: more focused on key performance indicators than on serious economic reshaping. “It’s a productive critique,” she added. “I think they can still turn it around. It’s not like they’ve got the wrong DNA for thinking this way. They just don’t have it set up right.” Making the public notice is still a huge challenge, Mazzucato warned. “Biden’s agenda worked, actually, economically, but it didn’t work in terms of resonating with people.” Mazzucato remains in touch with the government in what she calls a “light touch” way. She last met Chancellor Rachel Reeves in the spring, has contact with the No. 10 policy team, and has worked closely with Cabinet Office Minister Georgia Gould. Much of the proof that Starmer’s government is delivering will come from 11 Downing Street. Allies of Reeves say the top finance minister is actively working on the government’s growth strategy ahead of her fall budget. A fresh overhaul of planning laws is an “attempt to grip” the system and shift the way it works, said one person who speaks to No. 11 regularly. “The Treasury is really trying to get other departments to kick into gear,” they added. No. 10, meanwhile, plans to add more firepower of its own. As well as an in-house delivery team, Starmer has been seeking a high-profile economic adviser for at least six months. It is widely reported that he will appoint Minouche Shafik, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England who resigned as Columbia University’s president after turmoil over the treatment of Gaza war protests on campus. Government-funded childcare hours increase from Monday, while Starmer is expected to put a renewed focus on his pledge to open hundreds of nurseries in spare school classrooms. | Robert Ghement/EPA Former Greater London Authority official Kate Webb also joined No. 10 recently to work on infrastructure and housing policy, a person with knowledge of the appointment said, after Nick Williams left a similar post earlier this year. LESSONS FROM HISTORY If Tony Blair remains the model for government delivery, No. 10 aides can turn to a 20 year-old debate clip that many of them will be familiar with. It was April 2005, just ahead of a general election, and Blair faced an angry grilling from a voter in a BBC debate. The man complained he wasn’t allowed to schedule a doctors’ appointment for later in the week — because Blair had set a target for patients to be seen within 48 hours. It meant the man had to be seen within two days. Blair was agog. It appeared to be an example of KPIs gone mad — but it was also a clear example of a public service target that had cut through with the public and was working. Unlike Starmer, however, Blair had eight years in office under his belt by that moment — and didn’t have Farage’s Reform UK breathing down his neck. Farage is now making moonshot promises of his own, including a vow to deport hundreds of thousands of people. Labour aides have been encouraged by recent press interviews with Farage that have tested how deliverable his pledges are. “People forget that it took a long time to make that change under Tony Blair,” said the second Labour official quoted above. “It would be great if the speed of delivery ramped up with the size of our majority. Sadly it doesn’t work like that.” With Farage eyeing that majority in 2029, Starmer has to find a way of proving that his own brand of “deliverism” works — and soon. Patrick Baker interviewed Ravinder Athwal for Westminster Insider.

The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is grounded in the recognition that people, land, and society are deeply interlinked. But today, that connection is under strain. Farmers face mounting pressure from extreme weather, rising input costs and increasing regulatory complexity. Against this backdrop, the upcoming CAP reform is a pivotal moment, one that must deliver real outcomes to future-proof European agriculture.   To do that, policymakers should focus on three clear priorities: enabling co-investment between the public and private sectors; ensuring payments are simpler and rewarding farmers for what really matters; and equipping farmers with tailored support beyond payments. This is the foundation for a CAP that truly supports food security, climate action, and farmer livelihoods, while keeping food affordable for consumers.   By aligning around these priorities, the CAP can move beyond being just a rulebook for farmers and become a framework that brings together everyone involved in sustaining and shaping our food future, balancing agricultural progress with care for the environment and our communities. At PepsiCo, we see the impact of these policies up close, starting from the very first step of our value chain. Across the EU, we work with over 800 farmers to source key agricultural crops and ingredients, including potatoes, corn and oats. These ingredients are the backbone of iconic brands like Lay’s, Doritos, and Quaker, which rely on thriving farming communities and sustainable agricultural practices. Their success is our success. And so is their sustainability.  But I can also see that today’s farmers face an uncertain future. With the EU standing at a crossroads, we have to rethink how to support food security, respond to climate impacts and deliver more equitable outcomes for farmers, while keeping food affordable and accessible for consumers.   That’s why CAP reform matters now. Done right, the CAP can become a global model for a public-private partnership that drives meaningful and measurable progress across the full agri-food value chain.  On PepsiCo’s part, we remain committed to being a constructive partner in support of a more competitive, resilient and sustainable food system — based on regenerative agriculture.  This approach uses science-based farming practices that aim to restore ecosystems by improving soil health and fertility, reducing emissions, enhancing water quality and protecting biodiversity while also supporting farmer livelihoods. For example, in Jaén, southern Spain, we recently launched ‘Viva Oliva’ to support local olive growers, many of whom have been working in this historic trade for generations. Through this project, we’re providing hands-on training from agronomy experts so that farmers can protect the ecosystem more efficiently and conserve vital resources.   Crucially, these practices also create new opportunities, ensuring that farming can continue to be a viable option for the next generation. In 2024 we sourced 100 percent of the olive oil for our Alvalle gazpacho brand from Jaén, securing a high-quality local supply for Alvalle while strengthening the role of farmers in our supply shed.  > We’re investing in innovative techniques that bring life back to the land > because it is the right thing to do for our business, for the farmers we work > with and for the planet. Viva Oliva is just one of the many projects that’s helped us spread regenerative agriculture across a total of 3.5 million acres (approximately 1.4 million hectares) of farmland. Recently, we extended our target and are now aiming to reach 10 million acres (around 4 million hectares) globally by 2030.   We’re also taking action further upstream through partnerships with fertilizer companies like Yara, equipping farmers with precision tools to improve nutrient efficiency, increase yields and lower the carbon footprint of their crops. This collaboration supports approximately 1,000 farms across the EU and the UK that supply key ingredients for Lay’s and Walkers, covering around 128,000 hectares. By 2030 the partnership aims to reduce fertilizer production emissions by up to 80 percent and in-field fertilizer emissions by up to 20 percent, helping scale regenerative practices while supporting farmer productivity.  > Recently, we extended our regenerative agriculture target and are now aiming > to spread these practices across 10 million acres of farmland globally by > 2030. I know that we have the expertise and ambition to meet these goals, but we can’t do it alone. To make this a reality, we need EU policymakers to deliver a coherent and enabling regulatory framework that’s fit for purpose, based on three guiding principles.  Firstly, policymakers must match ambition with investment. Strong public funding is essential, but the CAP should be reimagined to enable co-investment through blended finance models, where public and private capital work together to accelerate impact. Private investment should be results driven, allowing trusted private-sector partners, who operate at size and scale, to co-design solutions with farmers.  Secondly, payments should be simpler and pay farmers for what really matters. This requires rewarding farmers not just for compliance but also for delivering real, measurable environmental benefits such as healthier soils, lower emissions, cleaner water, and richer biodiversity. Farming is unlike most other businesses, with income around 40 percent lower than non-agricultural income,1, which is why CAP incentives must reflect the true costs farmers face, including machinery upgrades and land-use shifts. And the system should incentivize progress over perfection — farmers who are already taking action should be compensated accordingly.  Thirdly, the CAP must recognize that farmers need support beyond payments. Investing in climate information systems, knowledge sharing networks, rural infrastructure and novel technologies will help accelerate and scale the implementation of new techniques — while ensuring profitability. Travelling across Europe to meet our teams on the ground, I see firsthand how local needs differ, so farmers should also be free to choose the solutions that are best suited to their region and crops to ensure policies are impactful.    > “Done right, the CAP can become a global model for a public-private > partnership that drives meaningful and measurable progress across the full > agrifood value chain. Archana Jagannathan And PepsiCo is committed to being part of that solution. Together with like-minded partners, we’re fully committed to growing food in a way that revitalizes the earth, supports farmer livelihoods, and feeds a growing population.  

Imagine a Europe at the cutting-edge of research, development and manufacturing. Where patients have access to the latest vaccines and treatments, first. A Europe with confidence in its resilience, health and economic security. The General Pharmaceutical Legislation (GPL) is one important step in realizing that vision. Get it right and we can begin to rebuild Europe’s life science eco-system. Get it wrong, and we risk accelerating the loss of research, development and manufacturing to other regions of the world.  It’s hard to miss the irony that almost nine months from Mario Draghi urging Europe to catch up with other regions by implementing a coordinated industrial policy or face a ‘slow agony’, our industry is nervously anticipating decisions that could, at best, maintain the same incentives framework that has seen our share of global investment decline over the last 20 years. The GPL offers some hope to up Europe’s game with a future-proof regulatory framework and new tools to tackle antimicrobial resistance. This does not sound like the recipe for European success … yet. Fierce competition from the US and China Whatever the geopolitical situation today, Draghi’s conclusions echoed numerous warnings highlighting Europe’s decades-long decline in life sciences. Since the legislation was last addressed in 2004, Europe has lost a quarter of its share of global R&D investment. And its share of global trials has halved, resulting in 60,000 fewer clinical trial places available for Europeans. Concurrently, spending on pharmaceutical R&D in China has grown almost five times faster than in Europe. China has doubled its number of commercial clinical trials since 2018; it now accounts for 18 percent of the global share. Their recent adoption of a proposal to introduce Regulatory Data Protection (RDP) signals China’s efforts to attract investment in R&D for innovative medicines. A step likely to be even more effective if Europe were to move in the opposite direction. Just 30 years ago, one in two new medicines originated in Europe, now it is just one in five. This is hardly a surprise given that the US went from spending €2bn more than Europe to spending €25bn more today over the same period. > Just 30 years ago, one in two new medicines originated in Europe, now it is > just one in five. Proposals to shape the future Since the framework was first introduced over 20 years ago, science has taken giant leaps forward. We are in a golden era of innovation, with much more to come. Immunotherapies empower the body to attack and destroy cancer cells, HIV can be managed, Hep C can be cured, and there is a good chance that cervical cancer could be eradicated thanks to the HPV vaccination. From prevention to care to cure, medicine is evolving rapidly. We strongly welcome, support and need the proposals to future proof the regulatory approval system. The regulatory sandbox is a big step in helping bring future breakthrough innovations of today and tomorrow to EU patients. Meanwhile, the proposal to use electronic-only patient information for medicinal products directly administered by healthcare professionals will reduce the administrative burden. > We strongly welcome, support and need the proposals to future proof the > regulatory approval system. Addressing another health emergency Similarly, since the legal framework was last addressed there has been widespread recognition that antimicrobial resistance represents one of the world’s most pressing health emergencies. Yet despite the urgent need, private investment in antimicrobial R&D is limited. To prevent bacteria developing resistance to existing treatments, the aim with any new antibiotic is to use it as little as possible — not an attractive proposition for investors. Included as a proposal in the GPL, the transferable exclusivity voucher is designed to address this challenge by rewarding the discovery of novel antibiotics without requiring upfront public investment. The GPL provides an opportunity for Europe to take the lead in delivering new antibiotics. Not only would this bring considerable cost-savings to every member state, it would also significantly boost R&D efforts in antibiotics, putting European researchers at its center. Proposals that accelerate negative trends In the context of recent shifts in US policy, trade tensions, concerns over national security, supply chain resilience, increasing levels of protectionism and the drive to address Europe’s competitiveness crisis, the initial proposals to erode European intellectual property (IP) in life sciences are now completely out of step. It takes two to launch a new medicine Many of the decisions that impact when patients get access to a new medicine are outside a company’s control, in fact, two-thirds of the delays to access medicines occur after companies have filed for pricing and reimbursement. For example, in Greece, companies can only file for reimbursement once a medicine is reimbursed in at least five of 11 designated EU countries, delaying filing due to the external reference pricing system. This structural condition adds to other delays, including those linked to limited healthcare funding and launch decisions. As a consequence, measures like obligating companies to launch in all 27 member states will completely fail to address inequalities in access to medicines while proving to be highly damaging to the sector’s presence in the EU. The proposal to reduce the Regulatory Data Protection (RDP) and Orphan Market Exclusivity would have a similar impact; the US already leads Europe on every investor metric from availability of capital to speed of approval and rewards for innovation. RDP for small molecules is the only appreciable benefit that the EU has over the US. The proposed expansion of the Bolar exemption — a legal provision that permits the narrow use of a patented medicine to support a generic’s marketing authorization application before IP expiration — would further erode Europe’s IP framework. It would likely lead to more litigation, reduce legal certainty and predictability, and negatively impact patients, including potentially introducing co-payment. Instead, the EU should create a clear notification system to give both generic and innovative companies transparent, reliable ‘day one’ certainty and safeguard IP protection. “If Europe truly wants to have research, development and manufacturing in the region, as well as delivering the best care for its citizens, it has to align the outcomes of discussions on the GPL with its ambition to be a world leader in medical innovation, maintain resilient supply chains and compete economically.” Nathalie Moll, director general, EFPIA. High stakes, high risk The stakes are high, and the risks tangible and immediate — but so are the opportunities. In recent weeks, global pharmaceutical companies, some of them headquartered in Europe, have announced hundreds of billions of dollars in investment into US manufacturing. This is likely just the beginning. > The stakes are high, and the risks tangible and immediate — but so are the > opportunities. A survey of 18 EFPIA members in April this year identified as much as 85 percent of capital expenditure investments (around €50.6 billion) and as much as 50 percent of R&D expenditure (around €52.6 billion) as being potentially at risk. Over the next three months alone, surveyed companies estimated that a total of €16.5 billion, or 10 percent of the total investment plans, are at risk. From intent to action There have been important positive statements of intent, reflected in the announcement of the Biotech Act, Life Sciences Strategy and Competitiveness Compass. Turning this intent into rapid and radical policy change will help, and the first tangible and visible signal will be the operating environment for companies in Europe created by the GPL. Investors and innovators are watching closely to see which side the GPL lands on.

The White House is debating whether to lift sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline and potentially other Russian assets in Europe as part of discussions on ending the war between Russia and Ukraine, five people familiar with the discussions told POLITICO. Lifting the sanctions currently in place on one of Russia’s main pipelines connecting its natural gas fields to Western Europe would be a sharp reversal in the U.S. policy first put in place during President Donald Trump’s first term. President Joe Biden waived those sanctions early in his term, but reimposed them after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Restarting Nord Stream 2 could provide a financial windfall to Moscow, but only if the EU agreed to accept buying Russian gas via the pipeline again — a prospect that seems unlikely given its campaign to wean itself off Russian energy imports. But lifting the sanctions would amount to a diplomatic coup for Russia and a major concession from Trump. White House special envoy Steve Witkoff has been the main proponent of lifting sanctions, people familiar with the talks told POLITICO. Witkoff, who has said he has developed a friendship with Putin in his role as Trump’s envoy to Moscow, has directed his team to draw up a list of all of the energy sanctions that the United States has placed on Russia as part of the effort, two people familiar with the matter said. One of the two Nord Stream 2 pipelines built to deliver gas via the Baltic Sea to Germany is still operable despite a 2022 explosion that destroyed one line, as well as the pair of pipelines that were part of its companion, Nord Stream 1. The blast in September 2022 that halted shipments of gas remains under investigation, though reports have linked the explosion to Ukrainian nationals. The Biden administration also placed sanctions on Russia’s Arctic 2 liquefied natural gas project, which could deliver up to 13.2 million tons of gas a year if those sanctions were lifted. Trump criticized Nord Stream during his first term and on the campaign trail. He attacked Biden for waiving sanctions on the project in 2021 before later reimposing them. Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been expected to participate in peace settlement talks scheduled Wednesday in London but bailed at the last minute. Included in the administration’s settlement plan was a recognition of Russia’s illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea and a lifting of sanctions — two things Ukraine said it would not agree to. The European Commission may suggest a ban on EU member countries signing new contracts with Russia for oil and gas. A second person said that while Witkoff has raised lifting energy-related sanctions, the idea so far has not found much traction in the White House and that Rubio has tried to derail it. “This is not a cake in the oven being baked, though the ingredients are being assembled,” this person said. The White House declined to comment. A spokesperson for Witkoff declined to comment. Among the people against the idea are Rubio and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who is also head of the White House Energy Dominance Council, people familiar with the debate said. Some in the U.S. government think Witkoff has been misled by the Kremlin about the extent of the economic opportunity for the U.S. in restoring business ties with Russia, according to another person familiar with the matter. “There is an internal White House debate between the energy dominance people — Burgum, who wants markets for U.S. LNG — and Witkoff, who wants to be closer to Russia,” one of the people said. Russia regaining its status as Europe’s top energy supplier would be “a bloodbath for American [oil and gas] producers,” this person continued. The State Department did not respond to questions. The Interior Department did not reply to an email with questions for Burgum. Allowing Russia to resume shipments of gas via Nord Stream 2 or Arctic 2 LNG would depress global gas prices and put U.S. LNG exporters like Cheniere Energy and other companies in direct competition with Russia, said Laurent Ruseckas, executive director a market analysis firm S&P Global Commodity Insights. “If you bring Russian gas back into the market, that would reduce the appetite of potential buyers of U.S. LNG,” Ruseckas said in an interview. The U.S. natural gas industry had made major inroads into Europe as Germany and other countries turned away from Russia as an energy supplier following its invasion of Ukraine. But oil and gas companies are now reeling from the Trump administration’s trade war and its tariffs on imported steel. The White House’s generally opaque trade policy has also made companies scale back their investing plans. Multiple outsiders are lobbying the administration to lift the sanctions, two of the people said. One of the wooers is Stephen Lynch, a Miami-based head of global private investment firm Monte Valley Partners. Lynch has made a specialty of buying energy infrastructure assets that had previously belonged to Russia. He and his partners in 2007 purchased parts of the Russian oil company Yukos at a steep discount. More recently, he purchased the Switzerland-based branch of Russian financial firm SberBank. He has applied for a license from the U.S. Treasury Department as part of his efforts to buy the pipeline. A Monte Valle representative did not reply to questions. Matthias Warnig, a former spy and close friend of Putin who is under U.S. sanctions, has also been working on an effort to restart the pipeline with the backing of U.S. investors. He has reached out to the Trump team through American business representatives and his effort is understood to be separate from Lynch’s consortium. The Biden team was not interested in Lynch’s efforts to buy the pipeline last year. Robbie Gramer contributed to this report.

BRUSSELS — The EU has long promised to tear down the barriers splintering its capital markets — but behind every delay lies a web of national interests and industry players profiting from the patchwork. But now, Brussels’ top financial official is signaling that the era of diplomatic restraint regarding such forces may be coming to an end. “We have been complacent, we have been settling for less,” the EU’s financial services commissioner, Maria Luís Albuquerque, told a room full of lobbyists and top officials in Warsaw last week, according to the text of a speech released by her office. The stakes have arguably never been higher. There’s broad consensus among policymakers that mobilizing private investment will be key to shaking off economic stagnation in Europe and delivering on the Commission’s defense agenda. Yet despite more than a decade of lofty ambitions and repeated political pledges, efforts to advance the capital markets union have consistently stalled. Albuquerque isn’t just reciting the party line on the bloc’s broken markets. Since taking office in December, the former Portuguese finance minister — and ex-Morgan Stanley insider — has publicly called out the vested interests holding EU markets back.  “We have endured — and even reinforced — persisting barriers that hurt us all, even if some have an immediate gain. Not anymore,” Albuquerque said, at the Eurofi conference. The object of her frustration are market players who are happy to preserve the status quo to fill their own coffers. In Warsaw, Albuquerque called out players in the bloc’s financial plumbing, including trading infrastructure, post-trading and asset management. As well as firms, she’s targeting protectionist behavior by national governments who keep markets fragmented to retain decision-making power, so that their own economies can benefit more in the short term.  BROKEN PARTS European equity markets, stock exchanges and financial plumbing known as post-trade infrastructure are a “complex patchwork,” which creates “a huge obstacle to building bigger and better capital markets,” the think tank New Financial wrote in a 2021 report on markets fragmentation. For as long as so many players remain in the market, the report said the EU “can tinker at the edges with the detail of regulation,” but “not much will change.” European equity markets, stock exchanges and financial plumbing are a “complex patchwork,” which creates “a huge obstacle to building bigger and better capital markets,” according to a New Financial report. | Kirill Kudryavstev/AFP via Getty Images To compare, U.S. equity markets are more than double the size of the EU’s, while having a small fraction of the exchanges for listings and trading that Europe has. The report found, for example, that the EU has 20 times as many post-trade venues as the U.S. American markets also benefit from just one non-profit company, the DTCC, being responsible for all the clearing and settlement of equity trades. In the EU, on the other hand, there are 295 trading venues, 14 clearinghouses and 32 central securities depositories. Most equity trading takes place in domestic exchanges. And while there are bigger exchange groups in the EU now, like Euronext and Nasdaq, the national exchanges within those groups are still separate, meaning the market is still fragmented.  IMF research often cited by the Commission calculates the damage of single market barriers to the EU as equivalent to a tariff of over 100 percent. In short, the barriers are real, self-imposed, and sacrifice long-term overall gains for the EU’s economy in favor of short-term gains for smaller players within the single market.  A LOBBYING STORY “Behind every barrier and behind every source of fragmentation, there is someone who is making money from the fragmentation,” the Commission’s top financial services official, John Berrigan, said at a conference in Brussels in March. He said the reasons for defending the entrenched interests are linked to the EU’s overall integration. The benefits of removing blockages are “diffuse” across the EU, making them harder to see and therefore fight for, whereas the loss of revenue to players benefiting from a source of fragmentation can be “quite concentrated.” “So those people speak out and they speak loud,” Berrigan said. One of the most heavily lobbied proposals in recent history sought to break down market barriers. The Commission’s Retail Investment Strategy, put forward in 2023, aimed for two major strides to boost the number of citizens investing — introducing accessible value-for-money benchmarks so investors across the EU could see how much bang they were getting for their buck, and banning kickbacks paid by asset managers to investment advisors in return for directing investors towards their products.  The kickbacks “generate conflicts of interest and can lead to the mis-selling of financial products, suboptimal asset allocation, and poorly performing investment products,” according to the NGO Better Finance. The trouble is, the finance industry makes money from the practice. Governments, heavily lobbied by asset managers, insurers, and others who benefit from the kickbacks, pressured the Commission into removing the ban before the text was even officially proposed back in 2023. A final agreement on the proposal still hasn’t happened.  Another proposal, for an EU ticker tape which would publish data on the prices and volume of traded securities in the EU, improving overall price transparency and competition, was hollowed out after — again — pressure from governments lobbied by their stock exchanges, whose business model of distributing that data for a premium price would be threatened by the tape. Under the political deal on that legislation, a weaker version of the ticker tape with less valuable information will still be set up, but stock exchanges are already forming consortia to bid to run the tape, meaning competition may be diluted. IMF research often cited by the Commission calculates the damage of single market barriers to the EU as equivalent to a tariff of over 100 percent. | Florian Wiegand/Getty Images Those are just two examples of many, but the pattern is clear — new EU initiatives which would deepen capital markets are hollowed out or ditched after governments, in thrall to their national finance industry champions, say no.  THE RULES Then there’s the stubborn issue of the rules and who enforces them. Although most agree that having a single rulebook and a single supervisor for EU capital markets actors would make the market more integrated, governments won’t give up their ownership of the rules and their supervision, with high-level summits on the issue ending in stalemate.  They also engage in “gold-plating” — when countries roll out EU rules differently at the national level. This is often to protect national investors or domestic economic interests, a fact that creates barriers for foreign entrants, damaging competition, according to a 2024 report by the Polish capital markets lobby group CFA Poland. The report singles out Germany, Spain, and Italy as high gold-plating countries, while it said investment hotspot Luxembourg gold-plates the least. The Commission wants to change this, planning to convert directives — EU laws which can be interpreted nationally in different ways — to regulations. The latter, unlike the former, have to be rolled out the same way across the EU, something that should help to centralize more supervision at the EU level. But governments are already pouring cold water on that idea. Polish finance minister Andrzej Domański, who is currently chairing EU-level talks as the head of the six-monthly rotating presidency, said there is “absolutely no room” for centralizing supervision, and that EU countries would only “accept” better “coordination” between existing national supervisors. Ultimately, the Commission can talk tough on breaking down vested interests that are keeping the EU’s capital market undersized and fragmented — but national governments will still need to be the ones who move to break down any barriers.

SOLANO COUNTY, California — It doesn’t take long, driving north from San Francisco past bay and sea, to remember just how new, in the scheme of things, this place is. Towns become infrequent and then disappear altogether, replaced by hills, fields and farms. The land opens up in green and yellow, a reminder of a time when California was defined in the national consciousness by verdant pastures and gold-flecked creeks, rather than by crime or unaffordability. In the mind of Jan Sramek, 38, a 6’7″-ish, Czech, new-urbanism evangelist, change comes quickly. Not so long ago, San Francisco, too, was a collection of camps and houses on an improbable spit of land at the end of the continent; Oakland, a swampy peninsula surrounded by orchards. As we built great bridges and towers, the hilly port city became the world’s center of technology and innovation. It would have seemed impossible, but then it happened. Working from a generic office park 40 miles north of San Francisco, Sramek believes it can happen again. As a child growing up in the post-Soviet Eastern bloc, Sramek became enchanted with the sparkling promise of California. And now, as an adult real estate entrepreneur, he envisions a future in which the hayfields and sleepy towns that surround him transform into a new glittering city — one divorced from the problems facing the Golden State’s older models. The name of the metropolis, California Forever, is itself an ode to what the state has achieved and could still. “The modern world was basically made in California over the last 100 years, and that meant it was built with Californian values,” Sramek said. “I think we have a responsibility to keep it going.” It is here, in an unheralded, 27 square mile swath of semi-rural Solano County, smack-dab between Sacramento and San Francisco, that Sramek intends to prove that California can still be bold. It is here, he says, where he will cut through the state’s red tape, build a model 400,000-person sustainable community, and triumphantly reestablish a tradition of dense and walkable cities dating back to the dawn of human civilization. If, at least, California lets him. The path has not been easy since Sramek announced his plans for a new city backed by tech luminaries, including Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs. If 2023 was the year in which Sramek unveiled California Forever to the world, 2024 was a forced humbling from a wary — and often downright hostile — public skeptical of billionaire outsiders. 2025 will now determine whether Sramek’s sweeping, transformational, and some argue self-serving, visions for the future are compatible with the slow-moving gears of local government. Just last year, he failed to get approval for his new city via referendum, pitching an updated urban center that was affordable and devoid of sprawl. But polling showed voters weren’t convinced of the merits, and he pulled the referendum from the ballot before it could be shot down. Now, Sramek is working with the county government to hash out the details of the plan in hopes of quelling concerns, gritting his teeth while enduring the county’s rolling demands for detailed paperwork. By year’s end, he will have to decide whether to go back to voters in 2026 on the whole grand vision. This is the new stage of Sramek’s quest, as he’s forced to build a new city by collaborating with the systems he seems to resent most. While Elon Musk and David Sacks, Trump’s crypto czar, test their ability to control Washington’s machinery, Sramek faces a choice: work methodically to win over a skeptical public — or bulldoze his way through local government, public opinion be damned. Long before Sramek pulled his initiative from the 2024 ballot, there were signs that things might not go according to plan. At a town hall in late November 2023, Sramek stood at a lectern wearing a casual button-down shirt and a bewildered look as he was dressed down by Solano County residents. The event in Vallejo, a working-class city of 124,000, was the first of eight such townhalls California Forever planned over the year — an early attempt at voter outreach as California Forever organizers began campaigning for a ballot measure that would allow them to rezone thousands of acres from agricultural to “new development” and begin building their city. Backed only by renderings of colorful neighborhood scenes, California Forever’s CEO seemed somewhat wrongfooted by the level of hostility of the crowd. “I’m sick and tired of developers coming in and we don’t know nothing,” a woman shouted at Sramek, as he looked on, mouth agape, during a recording of the meeting produced by ABC7 News Bay Area. “Honestly, I’m probably more skeptical now than I was when I walked in,” a man said just before walking out. It was far from a friendly reception, and a harsh reality check for Sramek and his tech billionaire-funded team, who projected a sense of exceptionalism from the time they arrived in Solano County. After moving to California in the 2010s, Sramek became fixated on the idea of solving the state’s housing crisis. Growth in existing cities wouldn’t be enough — he needed to do something big. After spending years researching the idea, he began quietly pitching big name funders to invest in the project, which he called California Forever. Then in 2018, he set his sights on Solano County, a region with the highest unemployment and child poverty rates in the Bay Area region. There, he thought, it was possible California Forever might find a receptive audience. The land, too, was appealing — a stretch of grazing properties that had once been identified by the Army Corps of Engineers as a future location for development. Sramek and California Forever started quietly buying up tens of thousands of acres of land, suing residents who chose not to sell — accusing them of price fixing — and becoming, almost overnight, the largest landowner in the county. Then, in August 2023, following a New York Times exposé outing their efforts, Sramek and California Forever announced themselves to the world in a burst of near-messianic fervor. Within the next five years, company officials declared, they would build a new city, right there in Solano County. They promised to bring jobs and cheap homes for the financially struggling region. They pledged to build hospitals and schools and water parks and sports complexes. And they would be taking the project straight to voters. A ballot initiative would allow them to eschew traditional county planning procedures, build outside of existing jurisdictions, and rewrite the zoning code to reclassify 17,500 acres of agricultural land for a community of 400,000 residents — roughly the population of Tampa, Florida. The plan was funded by the co-founder of LinkedIn, run by the one-time chief strategist for John McCain, and featured leaders of Kamala Harris’s presidential super PAC. “They just walked in and said, ‘Here’s the plan,’” said former Solano County supervisor Duane Kromm. Soon, California Forever embarked on a months-long, $10-million charm offensive with Sramek serving as its lead pitchman, cajoling residents of Solano County to back a ballot measure allowing him to bypass a decades-old orderly growth ordinance restricting development outside of existing cities. The initiative was written in a way that would give the county and the public minimal oversight over the future city. “This would solve the housing situation in Solano County and regionally,” Sramek argued at the time. “This would fix the lack of good-paying local jobs that we have been trying to fix in Solano County for 40 years.” By June 2024, they’d gathered enough signatures to place the initiative on the local November 2024 ballot. But by then, voters had already made up their minds. Many residents were disturbed by the lawsuits against their neighbors. Others were concerned about what the new development would mean for traffic and congestion; still others about the financial impact it would have on existing cities as well as its effect on threatened species and seasonal wetland habitat. Broadly, opposition rose from the perception that wealthy outsiders were trying to manufacture a hostile takeover of their county. In late July 2024, sensing imminent defeat, Sramek and his team pulled their measure from the ballot, an unceremonious end to what they’d seen as a can’t-fail campaign. In a joint statement with the county board of supervisors, Sramek said he would instead do what the county had originally asked: study the project, come to an agreement with administrators on a detailed development plan — and then return to voters to change the zoning code. But even that did little to mollify critics. The enemies of California Forever grew to be vast and varied, from farmers to climate advocates to the county Republican Party. (Sramek himself is not publicly affiliated with either party.) The quasi-utopian renderings of California Forever, ultimately, only aggravated voters. Those onlookers argue Sramek should’ve seen this coming — as evidenced by that Vallejo town hall in November 2023, long before the ballot measure campaign screeched to a halt. But back then, although maybe taken aback by the level of vitriol from locals, Sramek quickly shrugged off residents’ concerns. “Certain people just hate development,” Sramek told reporters after that meeting. According to two people who have worked with Sramek, he has always been guided by extreme self-confidence bordering on hubris. Sramek frequently left meetings with local elected officials positive that everything went swimmingly, according to those two people who have worked with him. He told reporters that most people in the county did, in fact, support the project. Polling indicated otherwise. For months, during the ballot measure campaign, his team advised him to keep a lower profile, according to former staff who were granted anonymity to speak candidly. The various perks, like water parks and hospitals, that he promised to the county were doing more harm than good, they argued. As one former employee put it, it looked like “you are just making shit up.” Sramek’s team disputes that narrative. In an emailed statement, a California Forever spokesperson said, “This was clearly going to be a controversial project in the beginning, and while there’s always room for improvement, by the end of July 2024, a poll of likely voters in Solano County conducted by Impact Research found that 65 percent supported development in east Solano County. “This, and the continued progress since then, is a testament to the community work and relationship-building that Jan and the California Forever team have been doing,” the spokesperson said. Catherine Moy, the mayor of a nearby town called Fairfield, framed things differently. “They couldn’t have done a worse job with PR to start their campaign,” Moy said. “Suing farmers that a lot of us grew up with for a half billion dollars? And it just got worse and worse from there.” The time between the town hall in November 2023 and the ballot measure’s failure seven months later seemed to be Silicon Valley’s education in local California politics, a fascinating case study in what happens when visionaries and deep-pocketed investors run up against the realities of regional land-use debates. That tension, of civil servants versus disruptors, is currently defining national politics. Elon Musk is trying to dismantle American bureaucracy from the inside out. Silicon Valley tech billionaires, some of whom are also funding California Forever, are flexing their muscles in Washington in an effort to see how deregulation can benefit them and their companies. Many of those same instincts animate Sramek’s quest, and he has earned comparisons to Musk in the county and from observers. He wants to move quickly, and he’s frustrated that California’s regulatory structure does not allow it. Although he submitted to the hard work of environmental impact reports, traffic studies, and emissions analyses after the referendum failed, he’s still not willing to accept the decade-long horizon that has become the norm for California projects. “If we can build a bridge spanning the Golden Gate, a 400-acre island in the middle of the Bay, and a brand-new jet that will revolutionizes aviation, all in under four years, then surely we can plan a new community in less than six,” Sramek wrote to county administrators in a heated letter in late October. “It should be entirely reasonable to get local approvals done by 2026, and shovels in the ground in 2028.” Except, of course, it’s never that easy in California. Last summer, on a now well-traveled tour of the future city, Sramek sipped a can of flavored carbonated water while driving a Rivian truck through the vast fields and farms of his future kingdom. It was August 2024, a challenging time for California Forever. The ballot measure had been pulled a month earlier. There was no clear path to success before voters. It seemed like the whole project could be teetering on the precipice. During the drive, as he wound through the Solano County exurbs into open space, Sramek vacillated between acceptance and being downright perplexed by the challenges posed to his masterplan. On one hand, land use debates in California, as he put it, are “a bloodsport.” The secretive land purchases, the intense local vitriol, the dramatic, nationally televised courtship with the county — in his view, that’s just the cost of doing business in California. On the other hand, the state has a housing crisis recognized by all levels of government. As Sramek sees things, his project would build that housing in one of the best places to do so in the state. It sits at the center of the San Francisco Bay mega-region, connecting both San Francisco and Sacramento. He said the thousands of acres his company owns in the rolling hayfields near the Sacramento River Delta is a rare Western location with no risk of fires, earthquakes or floods (although some of the land now does fall within the state’s newly updated wildfire hazard zones). For almost every criticism leveled at the project, Sramek believes he has an answer — a product of good planning and a solid year under the microscope. Water supply? The development will use what is currently going to a somewhat unproductive almond orchard to meet the needs of initial residents. Environmental concerns? Sensitive habitats, like seasonal pools where certain rare species breed, will be protected and preserved. Congestion getting into and out of the city? We’ve never had a problem building highways — we’ll just build more. “If you look at every state bill that has passed in California in the last 10 years, they call for a simple zoning code, walkable neighborhoods, affordability by design, sustainability and low emissions,” Sramek said. “Everything they are calling for is in our proposal. And the bottleneck to building it is widening seven miles of highway?” Sramek approaches his dream city with an almost fanatical intensity. In his view, California Forever is a chance to revive the type of city that has been lost to time in America. For hundreds of years, we created vibrant metropolises that were based around human movement: Athens, Madrid, London, and New York. Then, during World War II, the American wartime government issued a moratorium on new development. In the United States at least, the chain was broken, and post-war housing was built to serve the automobile. Today, many of the most desirable, dense, walkable cities are also the most expensive — and they were all built before the war. (Arguably one exception: Los Angeles, which is reasonably dense but built entirely around the car.) That pitch of the walkable city, underscored by the odd dynamic of Sramek selling his idea while driving a $60,000 electric truck down ranch roads, is what has attracted some of the richest people in the world to Sramek’s project. And however unfeasible it sounds, it is true that California Forever is not the first time that someone has conceived of a master-planned community. Celebration, Florida, the Disney-built resort community drafted in the model of quaint small-town America, sprang into being from the longleaf pines south of Orlando nearly 30 years ago. Even before that, Irvine, California was developed to escape pollution and crime in Los Angeles’ urban core. Perhaps the closest analogue to California Forever is Columbia, Maryland, a community built by a man named James Rouse in the 1960s who touted the city as a “garden for growing people,” where residents would live, work and respect the land. Like California Forever, the land was secretly bought up through dummy corporations, leading to local rumors that it was going to be turned into a sprawling municipal dump. Like California Forever, it was announced with salvational overtones, with plans to eliminate religious, racial and class discrimination. Like California Forever, it faced initial zoning concerns. Later, it became an extremely desirable place to live. Beyond Sramek’s obvious financial stake in the city (he’s put a significant sum into the project personally, although he has declined to say how much, and would make a lot of money if the city comes to fruition), he is also deeply invested in the project emotionally. Raised by working-class parents in a small town in the Czech Republic, he ultimately went on to study at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Soon after graduating, he worked as an investor at Goldman Sachs before moving to the United States to pursue a series of start-up ventures. During his apprenticeship in Silicon Valley, he began to think about how to solve California’s housing crisis. Although he first considered infill (the process of building new developments within existing cities), he quickly decided that the scale of these projects was infeasible to meet the moment. Then, slowly, the idea of California Forever began to form. That was nearly 10 years ago. “I spent eight years of my life buying this property without knowing that this would ever work,” Sramek said. “There are so many easier ways to make money than trying to build a new city.” The project, officially launched in 2017, is as much a real estate play as it is a chance to prove to himself that the California he imagined as a child still exists. As Sramek put it, the culture of post-communist Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall became enamored with all things American. California, with all its glamor and ambition and opportunity, was the outward projection of that. “There’s a really unique combination of people, natural beauty, climate, diversity, and openness to innovation that just happened in California,” Sramek said. “It’s extremely sad that we are destroying it, basically by an entirely unforced error.” As we whizzed past orchards and a small ranch house, he emphasized that the experts who support his development “weigh more heavily than a couple of angry voters who don’t know the details of the project.” He lashed out at public meetings with fuming residents as “undemocratic”; called the economic policy of California “self-inflicted suicide”; and the state’s environmental and planning regulations a “layer cake of bad ideas.” “Hollywood happened here, they found gold here in the hills, then Silicon Valley happened here, and then the countercultural revolution happened here,” Sramek said. “And then we screw it up because we can’t build enough housing?” In Sramek’s view, the state is at risk of becoming something like Florence, the ancient Italian city that was once Europe’s center of art and innovation and is now essentially a large, open-air museum. The decades of regulation and development roadblocks erected by California, in his view, could easily tumble the state in the same direction. You could build California Forever, with its commitments to advanced manufacturing and $30-billion private investment, or you could watch all those opportunities go elsewhere — essentially because of regulations. “When you take 50 good ideas and you lay them on top of each other, you don’t get an idea that’s 50 times as good as the 50 good ideas,” Sramek said. “You might actually get a really, really, terrible system.” And yet, it is that system that Sramek has pledged to work within, at least for the foreseeable future. He says working with the county doesn’t bother him (although his angry letters about the county’s pace indicate otherwise), and that pulling the ballot measure allowed his team of engineers and city planners to work out the details without the political pressure of a looming ballot measure. California Forever leaders have insisted that the decision to pull their measure was never an admission of defeat but rather a simple reorganization of steps. Voters, they said, rightfully had questions about the project. They promised to answer all of them over the next two years. Then they would return to the ballot. Last December, the grand, world-historic ideas behind California Forever landed on the desk of Solano County administrator Bill Emlen, a longtime county staffer who has been tasked with coordinating how to build America’s next great city. Emlen, who has lived in the county and worked in local government for over 30 years, epitomizes the kind of roadblock that seems to most infuriate Sramek. “Let’s face it, it’s not your average development proposal,” Emlen said. “And I don’t get the sense that governmental processes are something they particularly embrace.” According to Emlen, California Forever’s initiative never gave specific timelines for when development would occur, or how it would provide services to the community. Although he sympathized with the challenges to building new housing, he said there were always few details about how the highly touted affordable city would actually be created — no clear analysis of greenhouse gas emissions, no measurement system for tracking job creation, no nothing. After California Forever pledged to work with the county, Emlen wanted to know the answer to all those questions. And he had others, too. What about the impact on the nearby Air Force base? How would stormwater, sewage and transportation be provided? What about the loss of agricultural lands? In an October letter to Sramek, Emlen laid out the county’s needs: Submit a general plan, a rezoning plan, an environmental impact report and a development agreement. If the county and California Forever can come to an agreement, the project would still have to go before voters (presumably after having addressed their concerns). Developers usually have reams of material as they move through the permitting process. While California Forever blamed the county for its lack of motivation to move the project forward, Emlen said that even by the beginning of 2025, he had yet to receive those materials. “We’re kind of just waiting for them to file an application,” Emlen said in January. “They still haven’t done that yet.” It was an exponential demand on information for a team that leaned heavily on sweeping promises. Although Emlen recently announced he would be retiring at the end of March, the next county administrator will likely have similar questions. Sramek, meanwhile, says his team is in the process of submitting all the necessary paperwork to the county, and that he welcomes questions from elected officials and the community. He argues that he has no problem doing the regulatory work that makes a city better, safer, and more sustainable. But he refuses to accept delays that he believes will entrap his project in a bureaucratic death spiral that he argues is commonplace in California development. Edwin Okamura, the mayor of Rio Vista, a quaint river town adjacent to the California Forever property, said his conversations with Sramek have always been civil, and that it’s not so different from working with “any other businesspeople.” “You sit across from someone you may like or dislike, and when you leave the table you say, ‘OK, he’s really trying to push this project,’” Okamura said. “But you’re either at the table or you’re being cooked in the kitchen.” Okamura tries to avoid the emotional aspects of the California Forever debates, and he said that if Solano County rejected all investors simply because they were rich, no development would happen at all. That being said, there’s no part of him that believes Sramek’s city, as currently presented, is the best way forward for the county. California Forever’s success, quite likely, could come at the expense of existing cities like Rio Vista. And like Emlen, Okamura has only ever seen a vague outline of a plan, always extremely light on details. “I think many of the ideas that they have are great, better farming methods, better ranching methods, a sustainable community,” Okamura said. “But nothing has been proven.” At the end of January, after a month without rain, Northern California seemed to be held in a state of suspended animation. The familiar downpours were replaced by bluebird skies and warm days. California Forever, too, appeared to be on pause. The media attention and public developments surrounding the plan slowed to a crawl. Opponents of the project were still meeting relatively regularly, but without the intensity as during the ballot measure campaign. Sramek seemed to be getting nowhere with the county. To detractors, it appeared like David had defeated Goliath. Then, on Jan. 30, the leaders of Suisun City, a small, 28,000-person underdog city along the train tracks, dropped a bombshell in an agenda item during an otherwise routine city council meeting: They would be working with “regional partners” to explore expanding their city, and annexing the land around them. Notably, the only direction the city could expand was east, directly into the land owned by California Forever. Although Suisun City council voted only to explore the possibility of annexing the land, it shocked Solano County residents who for months viewed the project as dead in the water. Suddenly, Sramek’s plan was revived. “At only four square miles, we are Solano County’s smallest city,” Suisun City manager Bret Prebula said in a statement following the council meeting. “Now is the time to consider what more we can do to creatively grow our community and deliver more economic opportunity.” Even when they were failing to convince voters, California Forever was always trying to woo local leadership — with little to no success. For months on end, almost no elected officials had come out in support of the project. At an event for a local elected official in 2023, Suisun City Councilmember Princess Washington said she was lobbied by a representative for California Forever who demanded to know if she would support the project. (She didn’t.) Meanwhile, Moy, the mayor of the nearby town of Fairfield, said that California Forever would likely try to get their supporters into office if local officials didn’t get on board. But now, it seemed like all the California Forever team’s efforts had finally paid dividends with financially struggling Suisun City. It was also a potential end-run around voters. They would no longer have to work with the county. A countywide ballot initiative would no longer be necessary. Instead, the process would resemble a traditional municipal land-use project, and the annexation would only need the approval of a regional planning agency to proceed. The land they’ve already bought up would be incorporated into Suisun City, and California Forever could start building. It would just have a different name. “The project would stop being California Forever and it would start being the city of Suisun. That’s what was a total mind trip,” said Washington, who is the only council member who voted against exploring the annexation. “To do this was very cunning. It’s diabolical.” Sramek and California Forever, for their part, declined to confirm any agreement with the city, saying only they would be “open to discussion.” The power dynamic, again, appears to have shifted. Earlier this month, Rio Vista City Council announced that they too would be exploring a potential partnership with California Forever — formally claiming their seat at the dinner table. After Suisun City’s decision, even Moy, the mayor and a frequent critic, reached out to Sramek and California Forever to discuss ways in which her city, Fairfield, could collaborate with the project. In return, she received a letter from the company, shared with POLITICO Magazine, outlining the negative comments Moy had made in the press about Sramek and the team, accusing her of “brand damage” and a “persistent campaign of slander.” “Ms. Moy has proven herself either unable or unwilling to deal with any facts or reality,” the letter read. “Could you please let us know how the city plans to address the brand problems Ms. Moy has created?” The letter was nameless, signed, simply, California Forever. It is that spirit of vindictiveness, perhaps a natural counterpoint to Sramek’s fervent belief that this project must come to fruition, that has now cast a shadow over elected leaders in Solano County. At one point, it seemed that California Forever’s endless resources alone were not enough. Today, it seems that they are. “They’ve forced our hand,” Okamura said. “We need to be at the table, and we need to start being more forward thinking.” On the tour of Sramek’s hayfields, it’s not impossible to see the outlines of his vision. The city limits would begin here, the advanced manufacturing district there, the ring of parks and open space now here. With a little imagination, you can picture the rolling golden hills as scenic backstops for a bustling community, trails leading to a lookout point for weekend hikers glancing back down at their neighborhood, kids biking around leafy streets like all those renderings presented at town hall meetings. After all, things can change quickly out here. It’s harder to imagine, if California Forever is ultimately built, that the people of Solano County will feel like it was their decision. Should the Suisun City annexation play out as some expect, they will have watched wealthy outsiders come in and remake their county as they see fit, without ever getting to vote on it. As in Washington, Silicon Valley does not seem to be in the mood to take “no” for an answer. In conversations with Sramek, he seems little concerned with that eventuality — that Solano County residents will always oppose this plan, regardless of how good of an idea he believes it is. In February 2024, Sramek said he had a conversation with an elected official privately supportive of the project who described opposition in the county as something akin to stages of grief. First, people were angry. Then there was disappointment, then bargaining. Eventually, he said, there will come acceptance. “I pitched what I wanted to build. That’s what I pitched. I talked about what I thought California could become. I talked about what I thought Solano County could become,” Sramek said, driving the car out of the fields and back toward civilization. “The process was controversial. But I think it ended in the right spot.”

PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron is pressing his government to quickly carve out extra funding for defense amid fears of an American pivot away from Europe under United States President Donald Trump. On Thursday, Macron held a meeting with Prime Minister François Bayrou, a centrist ally, to discuss the scale of the increases in spending needed to beef up France’s armed forces to make up for the possible American retrenchment and counterthreats from Russia. The duo were expected to “set a sort of trajectory” for upcoming defense expenditures, said a person with knowledge of talks.  Bayrou said last week that finding solutions to finance the military could take up to two months. “We need to change gears,” a government adviser, who, like other people in this story, was granted anonymity to candidly discuss sensitive negotiations, told POLITICO. “It’s absolutely essential to link the efforts needed to the international emergency.” France currently spends 2.1 percent of its gross domestic product on its military annually, but Macron wants to get that figure to more than 3 percent. According to estimates by French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu, France’s military would ideally need a yearly budget of just under €100 billion — which would amount to finding about €30 billion more each year compared to what was previously foreseen by the military planning law passed in 2023. But with France’s state deficit already expected to reach over 5 percent of GDP in 2025, it’s unclear where to find the cash to boost defense spending without raising taxes — which Macron has ruled out — or making deep cuts to welfare spending.  Some of the options on the table have included increasing working hours; controversially rowing back on commitments to review Macron’s pensions reform; and tapping into private investment. PUBLIC INVESTMENT BANK TO THE RESCUE  In parallel to efforts to increase the state defense budget, the economy ministry has been tasked with finding ways to help the defense industry easier access capital and loans. This week, several closed-door preparatory meetings have taken place between the prime minister’s office, the armed forces and economy ministries as well as lawmakers to prepare for a highly anticipated gathering on March 20 involving government ministers and representatives from the French banking and defensive industries. After next week’s meeting, Economy and Finance Minister Éric Lombard and Lecornu are expected to unveil plans that will incentivize banks and private investors to help grow France’s defense sector. When it comes to unlocking capital, the economy ministry’s preferred option is to leverage the Public Investment Bank, or Bpifrance, and the state-funded Caisse des dépôts et consignations, three people with firsthand knowledge of the plans told POLITICO. French life insurance policies, a type of savings product, could also be used to channel funds into the defense industry, they said.  “There are several avenues being explored, including strengthening Bpifrance’s instruments, possibly in the form of a retail fund that could open up possibilities for the general public,” said one of the individuals. On Thursday, Lombard ruled out setting up a new type savings account dedicated to defense. The economy ministry has also refused to tap into funds from France’s most popular savings account, the Livret A — even as Macron said that people’s savings could be mobilized to finance the defense effort. One of the arguments is that French citizens wouldn’t have the possibility to opt out, because of the way the savings account is structured.  Lawmakers from both the National Assembly and the Senate have long pushed for parts of the Livret A to be used to help defense small and medium enterprises borrow money — and there is “some discontent” about the economy ministry’s refusal to move on the issue, said one of the three individuals with firsthand knowledge the ministry’s plans cited earlier in this story. The Livret A is “the point that can move the most in the next 10 days,” another one of the people said. 

Jean Pisani-Ferry and Simone Tagliapietra are senior fellows at Bruegel. Laurence Tubiana is the CEO of the European Climate Foundation. Since European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was reelected last July, her message on the future of the green transition has been clear and consistent: We will stay the course on the goals of the European Green Deal, and will put forward a strong Clean Industrial Deal — marrying decarbonization with industrial competitiveness — in order to ensure this happens. And with the new administration in Washington, delivering on these two promises is more important than ever. U.S. President Donald Trump’s fossil-fuel agenda might be in America’s interest, but it certainly has no content for a fossil-fuel poor continent like Europe. And accelerating decarbonization is the only structural way to reduce the bloc’s energy costs and increase energy security. It’s also important to remember that while the Trump presidency poses new challenges, it presents new opportunities as well — starting with the clean tech sector, which it has thrown into deep uncertainty. Europe has the potential to play an important role here, but it will have to move fast, and be smart and more united than before. The new Competitiveness Compass is a first step in this direction, identifying the Clean Industrial Deal as one of the three pillars of the EU’s new competitiveness strategy, alongside innovation and economic security. However, it’s high time the EU turned its strategic planning into real action. We will, of course, gain more clarity as to what lies ahead when the Clean Industrial Deal and the Omnibus Simplification Package are finally launched on Feb. 26. They will tell us just how far the EU is willing to go to deliver on von der Leyen’s green promises. And considering ongoing tensions between those who want to maintain Europe’s climate ambitions and those who would like to give the matter a substantial rethink — or “pause” — we can’t take the outcome for granted. That’s why, ahead of the expected flurry of proposals, we would like to suggest two key areas of focus that might help untangle the bloc’s direction of travel. First, when it comes to the Clean Industrial Deal, we suggest looking at financing. Simply put, it’s impossible to have a solid clean industrial strategy without credible investment to underpin it. Building on previous Commission analyses, we can estimate that delivering the deal’s objectives might entail additional annual investments to the order of €50 billion by 2030. And though this figure appears substantial, it might actually be quite conservative, as it doesn’t take into consideration the potential cost of escalating global trade tensions or the re-skilling programs necessary for workers during the transition. The private sector is expected to deliver most of the investment needed, but the public sector will continue to play an important role in de-risking and helping to unleash private capital. And doing so will be arduous, as both EU and national policymakers are set to face growing constraints, like the end of the NextGenerationEU recovery package, the lack of a green carve-out in the bloc’s reformed fiscal framework, and increasing pressure to refocus public resources on defense. That’s why the Clean Industrial Deal can’t come up empty handed on this. It can’t limit itself to general pledges on the future budget either — the new cycle won’t start until 2028, and it will already be an uphill battle to retain the current minimum share of climate-related spending. It needs be equipped with immediate financial firepower. Trump presidency poses new challenges, it presents new opportunities as well — starting with the clean tech sector. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Next, with the Omnibus Simplification Package, we recommend examining whether or not “simplification” equates to dismantling green regulations. Reopening the core text of important green regulations — things like the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive or the Taxonomy Regulation — would inevitably water down these provisions substantially. It would hit investors who promptly started adapting to the new regulatory framework, as well as third countries that already started following the EU’s lead. Essentially, it would compromise the long-term regulatory stability and policy credibility that’s key for private investors. Therefore, it would be wiser for the Commission to focus on targeted actions at the technical level of these regulations instead — making the overall framework simpler, clearer and thus more effective. This package might be domestic, but it will have international repercussions in terms of the credibility of Europe’s climate policy. Watering down these provisions would cause major reputational damage to the EU — and it would fuel global anti-climate policy impulses at a time when the bloc must lead global climate momentum to fill the gap left by Trump.