The use of biofuel as a type of renewable energy dates back to the dawn of the global car industry in the nineteenth century. The attractiveness of biofuels derives from their ability to function as a drop-in alternative to fossils fuels such as petrol and diesel. According to the International Energy Agency, if the world is to stay within 2 °C of warming, annual production of transport biofuels must treble between 2017 and 2030 (Raval, 2018). The promotion of renewable energy has been actively discussed in the EU for many decades. But in the late 1990s, a period when EU climate and energy policies were evolving rapidly (see Chapter 3), the EU did not have a coherent, Europe-wide policy to promote the use of biofuels. So, the Commission began to prepare the ground, formulating fresh proposals for an EU-level policy to ramp up domestic production and use. The transport sector was an obvious target, the assumption being that from a technological perspective, greater biofuel use would not be overly disruptive.

We do not owe copyright law any nostalgia. Extreme copyright laws are altering cultures across the globe. Given that we are already engineering culture through law, we need to seriously consider the unintended negative harms that result. Since cultures will and should change over time, so should the law that relates to culture – i.e., copyright law will and should change along with the culture it governs. Thus attempts to reform copyright should not be dismissed on the grounds that reform will alter our culture, given that copyright has already fundamentally done so and continues to do so.

In the spirit of Richelieu, entertainment multinationals seek to increase their wealth by subduing the prospects of the poor in developing countries. Their misguided quest for ever more profit leads them to lobby Congress to exert pressure on poor countries to enact and maintain extreme copyright laws.2 As a result, excessive copyright protections in developing countries suppress education and the adoption of human rights because they make it more expensive to access knowledge and entertainment.3

Climate change is often described as a wicked policy problem par excellence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made the scientific case for cutting greenhouse gas emissions to effectively zero by the middle of this century (‘net zero’ emissions), most recently in its 2018 special report on the most likely impacts of a temperature rise of 1.5°C (IPCC, 2018: 1). That report effectively underlined the need for ‘rapid, far reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ (IPCC, 2018: 1). The economic rationale for adopting such a radically different trajectory of human development is well known. So why – to paraphrase Nicholas Stern (2015), one of the world’s leading climate economists – is the world still waiting for deep and rapid decarbonisation to occur?

This chapter explores how policy designers in the European Union (EU) have addressed the challenge of climate change. In particular, it outlines the broad design space in which they have sought to create and sustain more durable policies. Starting with the broad aims of EU climate policy and then moving down to the establishment of particular aims, objectives and instruments, it reveals what design decisions were made, by whom and for what purpose. In particular, it focuses on how, when and why designers built durability and flexibility devices into their policy packages. Much of the previous work on policy durability and feedback has, as we noted in Chapter 1, concerned policies and design spaces that have a strongly distributive character. Therefore, Section 3.2 begins by exploring the nature of climate change as a distinct policy problem (Rosenbloom et al., 2019: 169), pinpointing how the design challenges (and hence design spaces) differ from those in national social and welfare state policy. Section 3.3 builds on these insights by summarising the main instrument choices that were made in EU environmental policy in the past. In doing so, it reveals what Howlett and Cashore (2009: 39) would characterise as the EU’s ‘policy instrument logic’. Although there are well-known theoretical advantages of selecting from the full array of instruments (Jordan et al., 2003: 12–16), we demonstrate that the EU has a strong preference for regulatory instruments. Our analysis then moves along the instrument continuum introduced in Chapter 1, i.e. starting with regulation and ending with voluntary action. Section 3.4 focuses on the historical evolution of EU climate policy since the late 1970s, noting how climate policies have incorporated different combinations of durability and flexibility devices. Finally, Section 3.5 summarises the main points about design choices and spaces in the EU.

Policy durability is regularly identified as a critical ingredient in society’s response to the wicked policy challenge of climate change. Over the course of the last three decades, many climate and energy policies have been adopted. In fact, in Chapter 1 we noted that climate change probably constitutes one of the most active sub-areas of environmental policy making. However, we also noted another, more ‘inconvenient truth’ about climate governance: that a surprisingly large number of climate policies are not sufficiently durable or effective enough (van Renssen, 2018). Indeed, climate policy is widely regarded as being especially susceptible to weakening and reversal (Rosenbloom et al., 2019: 168), because it generally targets powerful vested interest groups and does not deliver immediate and visible policy benefits to voters.

Art is vital to us all. The diversity of its benefits rivals the variety within humankind. This is because art is our attempt to reach out to others. On the other end of that connection, the consumption of art refreshes us and offers us the possibility of joining ourselves to others’ life experiences. After a day full of bureaucracy, paperwork, expectations, commands, judgments, callousness, and grind, we search for stories of humor, adventure, lust, or gentleness. But, in our exhaustion, we often seek connection that demands little energy – consumption of entertainment. Some such entertainment may be crucial to our well-being. In the words of Rosemary Coombe, “the consumption of commodified representational forms is productive activity in which people engage in meaning-making to adapt signs, texts, and images to their own agendas.”2