Environment

The central environmental principle should be conservation.

Society should avoid unnecessary extraction, unnecessary energy use, unnecessary infrastructure, and unnecessary destruction of ecosystems.

Economic growth should not be treated as an overriding objective when it requires increasing pressure on finite physical resources.

The relevant question is not simply whether an activity increases monetary output.

It is whether the activity improves society while remaining compatible with resource constraints and ecological limits.

Between two solutions providing a comparable service, preference should generally be given to the one requiring:

• less energy;
• fewer materials;
• less land;
• less water;
• less infrastructure;
• fewer non-renewable resources;
• lower long-term maintenance requirements;
• lower environmental externalities.

This principle should apply to engineering, transport, construction, industry, digital systems, energy, agriculture, and public procurement.

Efficiency should be considered over the complete life cycle rather than only during operation.

Technical efficiency is necessary but not always sufficient.

An increasingly efficient system can still consume more resources overall if the volume of activity continues to grow.

Public policy should therefore also consider sufficiency.

When an activity consumes significant resources while providing limited social value, reducing unnecessary consumption may be preferable to merely making the same consumption slightly more efficient.

Sobriety should not mean arbitrary deprivation.

It should mean avoiding waste and organising society so that a good standard of living requires fewer physical resources.

Products should be designed to last.

Planned obsolescence is environmentally unacceptable because it transforms energy, materials, industrial capacity, and human labour into avoidable waste.

Public policy should strongly promote or require:

• durability;
• repairability;
• replaceable components;
• long-term availability of spare parts;
• technical documentation;
• software maintenance;
• security updates;
• standardised interfaces;
• dismantlability;
• reuse;
• recycling.

Manufacturers should not be allowed to use software locks, proprietary components, unavailable documentation, or artificial incompatibilities to make otherwise functional products unusable.

The right to repair should be a fundamental principle of product policy.

Users, independent repairers, and professional maintenance organisations should have access to the information, parts, tools, and software required to maintain products.

Repair should not depend unnecessarily on authorisation from the original manufacturer.

Public policy should favour products whose useful life can be extended through maintenance rather than replacement.

A circular economy should aim to reduce extraction before merely improving waste treatment.

The priority order should generally be:

1. avoid unnecessary consumption;
2. extend product lifetime;
3. repair;
4. reuse;
5. refurbish;
6. remanufacture;
7. recycle;
8. dispose only when no better option remains.

Recycling is useful, but it should not be used to justify disposable product design.

A product that lasts twenty years is usually preferable to one that is recycled after three.

Environmental decisions should be based on complete life-cycle analysis.

This includes:

• extraction;
• processing;
• manufacturing;
• transport;
• construction;
• operation;
• maintenance;
• replacement;
• energy consumption;
• repairability;
• recycling;
• final disposal.

Moving pollution, mining, emissions, or waste to another country does not eliminate the environmental impact.

European environmental policy should therefore account for imported impacts as well as domestic ones.

Companies should be responsible for the environmental consequences of the products and processes they place on the market.

Environmental externalities should not simply be transferred to the public.

Where appropriate, producers should bear the cost of:

• pollution;
• waste treatment;
• remediation;
• recycling;
• product recovery;
• environmental damage;
• long-term monitoring.

Activities causing disproportionate and avoidable environmental damage should not merely become slightly more expensive.

Where the damage is sufficiently serious, irreversible, or unnecessary, regulation should be capable of restricting or prohibiting the activity.

Environmental standards should not stop at European borders.

Products imported into Europe should, as far as practicable, be subject to environmental requirements comparable to those imposed on European producers.

Otherwise, strict European standards may simply relocate extraction, pollution, poor industrial practices, and carbon emissions abroad.

Trade policy should therefore consider:

• carbon intensity;
• pollution;
• resource extraction;
• industrial standards;
• traceability;
• environmental compliance.

Environmental policy should reduce global impacts rather than merely improve European statistics.

Biodiversity protection should be treated as a major political objective in its own right.

The value of ecosystems cannot be reduced to their immediate commercial value.

Healthy ecosystems support:

• food production;
• water cycles;
• soil formation;
• climate regulation;
• pollination;
• resilience;
• genetic diversity;
• long-term ecological stability.

Some environmental losses are effectively irreversible on human time scales.

The absence of an immediate financial return is therefore not a valid reason to neglect biodiversity protection.

Artificialisation of natural and agricultural land should be reduced sharply.

Before consuming new land, public policy should prioritise:

• renovation;
• reuse of existing buildings;
• redevelopment of already artificialised areas;
• use of vacant buildings;
• denser and better planned development where appropriate.

Agricultural land, forests, wetlands, and natural habitats should not be treated as an unlimited reserve for urban expansion.

Land is a finite resource.

Environmental policy should strongly favour the reuse of existing buildings.

Constructing new housing while large quantities of usable housing remain vacant wastes land, materials, energy, and infrastructure.

Renovation and mobilisation of existing housing stock should therefore often take priority over additional construction.

This also links environmental policy with housing policy and social justice.

Transport policy should minimise resource use, energy consumption, pollution, and unnecessary infrastructure.

Rail, public transport, cycling, and walking should receive priority where they provide realistic alternatives.

Rail is particularly important for medium- and long-distance transport because it can move large numbers of people and large quantities of goods with relatively low energy consumption.

Public investment should therefore favour:

• reliable rail networks;
• regional rail;
• urban public transport;
• cycling infrastructure;
• pedestrian infrastructure;
• freight rail;
• intermodal transport.

The private car remains necessary in many situations, particularly in rural areas and for certain professional or accessibility needs.

Environmental policy should therefore not assume that all car use can simply be eliminated.

The objective should instead be to reduce unnecessary dependency on cars.

Urban planning, public transport, rail, local services, and infrastructure should make it possible to live without mandatory daily car use wherever this is reasonably achievable.

Aviation has legitimate uses but should not be treated as environmentally costless.

Short-distance flights should be reduced where a practical and sufficiently fast rail alternative exists.

Rail should be developed so that replacing short flights becomes technically and socially realistic rather than merely punitive.

Long-distance aviation should also bear more of its environmental cost.

Taxation and regulation should better reflect fuel use, emissions, and other externalities while preserving necessary international connectivity.

Europe should maintain strong agricultural production and food sovereignty while reducing unnecessary environmental damage.

Agricultural policy should aim to:

• protect soils;
• preserve water resources;
• reduce dependence on harmful pesticides;
• reduce unnecessary fertiliser use;
• maintain biodiversity;
• reduce fossil-fuel dependence;
• improve resilience;
• preserve productive agricultural land;
• shorten supply chains where useful;
• reduce waste.

Environmental policy should work with farmers rather than treating food production itself as an environmental problem.

The objective should be productive agriculture that can remain viable over the long term without degrading the physical resources on which it depends.

Deep decarbonisation is necessary.

Fossil-fuel dependence should be reduced rapidly through a combination of:

• low-carbon electricity;
• electrification;
• efficient infrastructure;
• public transport;
• industrial transformation;
• energy efficiency;
• resource conservation.

Climate policy should be technically credible.

Measures that merely relocate emissions, replace one form of waste with another, or produce attractive accounting figures without reducing total physical impact should not be considered successful.

Environmental policy will sometimes conflict with short-term economic growth.

In such cases, growth should not automatically win.

There is little value in increasing monetary activity by accelerating the depletion of resources or degrading the ecosystems required for future economic and social activity.

A sustainable economy should optimise within environmental constraints rather than treating those constraints as obstacles to be removed.

Money is not a physical resource.

Every economy ultimately depends on energy, materials, ecosystems, labour, knowledge, infrastructure, and time.

Environmental policy should therefore evaluate physical flows directly.

A solution that appears financially cheap may be expensive in:

• energy;
• materials;
• land;
• pollution;
• resource depletion;
• waste;
• long-term environmental damage.

Conversely, a solution that is initially more expensive in monetary terms may be preferable if it preserves physical resources and reduces long-term damage.

Environmental policy requires time horizons measured in decades.

Political decisions should therefore account for consequences that extend beyond electoral cycles.

Infrastructure, ecosystems, energy systems, land use, industrial capacity, and resource consumption all produce effects that can last for generations.

The objective should be to leave future generations a society with functioning infrastructure, preserved ecosystems, access to resources, technical knowledge, and a stable physical environment.

Environmental conservation is therefore not a secondary policy area.

It is one of the conditions on which every other long-term political objective depends.