After Paris, I must say, I got a little tired with all the patience you need. So I was going back and said now, okay, you need to implement the Paris Agreement. And as Europe, we said we want to do at least 40% emission reductions by the year 2030. And of course, that is not like mana falling from heaven. You really have to get the legislation for that. So what I will talk today about is what are the economy-wide climate initiatives we are taking. And there's really three pillars of that. One is the emissions trading system covering about 40% of Europe's emissions. Then we have the, what is called the effort sharing. And I will explain to you why it's called effort sharing. And then also the land use. And the effort sharing covers around 60% of European emissions. So this is the kind of the top layer. Well, we need to accomplish emission reductions in different sectors. So we also have EU-wide policies at sectoral level. And particularly in the energy sector and in the transport sector. Energy accounts for about 80% of European emissions. So that is really key to be addressed. And there is legislation we came put out in November last year on renewables, energy efficiency, electricity market design governance, and then transport this year waste we have and also fluorinated gases. So if I were to tell you all that today, then probably we'll be sitting here for quite a number of hours. So I will have to be selective. Despite the fact that I have many slides, I will focus on number two. I will then maybe talk a little bit about renewables and energy efficiency. And the rest I will leave aside for today. Should there be questions later in the from the audience, then I'm too happy to speak also to the other subjects. What I will also talk about is what is we call in Europe the enabling environment. But that is kind of the a few sentence at the end. So let's get started. Where are we in terms of the objectives? And of course, when we talk climate, when we talk Paris, we all talk about emission reductions, greenhouse gases, we talk about adaptation. But in Europe, I think we have taken the view that we need to look broader because there is so many policy objectives. In terms of the highest at the moment in Europe is growth employment because we have so many problems in different economies. So that is something we will have to address. When it comes to the energy, we have looked at what is called the energy union. So these are five big pillars we need to look at. And that is not only the greenhouse gas emissions. So the decarbonization of the economy, which is one important element in that. But we also talk about energy security. We talk about solidarity, that we have affordable energy for all citizens in Europe, that we have a fully integrated internal energy market. Energy efficiency is a specific objective here, but it also covers innovation. It covers research and competitiveness. So these are things we need to take into consideration when we think about climate policies. Where are we in terms of our emissions? And if you look back to 1990, where more or less climate negotiations internationally started, our GDP has grown by about 50% in Europe. And our greenhouse gas emissions have gone down to minus 22% in the year 2015. And this is a very important slide, and it was very important in the international negotiations. Because we could show that in one way or the other, we will be able to decouple economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions when it comes to the production we have in Europe. And that was important because if you look at the international negotiations, one of the arguments that was always put forward is that you can either save the climate or you can grow your emissions. We don't think in Europe that that is right. We can find different solutions to that. But if you look at the different sectors, the picture is very different. We have steep reductions in the industry sector. We have quite some reductions in the energy sector. One sector that is straddling behind is the transport sector. That is the top curve, the light blue curve. So this is something where we will have to do more in future. But many other sectors, we can see emission reductions that have been happening over the past. If you look at the moment, what we have in legislation is our 2020 targets. Minus 20% in greenhouse gas emissions, 20% renewable energy, and 20% improvement in energy efficiency. And the way we count in Europe energy efficiency is not an efficiency indicator. It's the amount of energy we consume, so against a baseline. So when we say 20% improvement, it's against that baseline, that improvement of energy efficiency. What it means is that demand for energy is going to fall until 2020. And we see that happening at the moment. One other area that is important is interconnections. So that is the electricity market that we integrate the different parts of Europe for the year 2030 and that is Paris relevant. Our offer internationally was to have at least minus 40% emission reductions on the greenhouse gas side. When it comes to renewables, get up to 27% energy efficiency improvement by 30% in the year 2030. So these are the kind of headline targets we are looking at in our climate and energy policy. If you look at what does that mean for the longer term, you can see here the long term roadmap we have been putting out in Europe. Current policy means our 2020 policies, so they would have led to reductions of something like minus 40% in the year 2050. Now with the new policies that are being proposed, we would go along the curve which is shown and indicated there by the power sector, so we would get to 80% emission reductions in the year 2050. So that's the kind of long term thinking behind the current plans. Again, the structure of the policy is that we have the emissions trading, covering power and energy sector, industry and aviation. That is aviation within Europe. We have the non ETS sector where we have the effort sharing, the ESR, it's called here which includes households, road transport, buildings, waste, agriculture, non CO2 emissions and then we have Lulu CF. Up to now, these are pillars that stand on their own and there is no interconnection. The new thing with the current proposals on the table that are being discussed is that for the first time we start linking these pillars up. So there is a flexibility that is proposed to move from the emissions trading to the non ETS sectors. There's a group of member states that will be able to use about 100 million tons instead of giving that as an allocation to the energy sector. They could use it in order to cover emissions from households or from transport or agriculture. And also from the other side, the land use side. For the first time, we could have credits that could come into the effort sharing. For instance, to cover or to substitute with reductions that you would normally expect from agriculture and non CO2 emissions and that could come from the credits that you generate under the land use system. So that's the first step on further integration and that is something that is very different to what we had in the past. Let me now come to the emissions trading. It's a cap and trade system and that cap is set on a declining trajectory. At the present point in time, every year it goes down by 1.74%. The new proposal until 2030 is 2.2%. And in the parliament there's even discussions to ramp that up to 2.4%. The coverage is about 12,000 energy intensive installations. And as I said already covers around 40% of CO2 emissions. The problem we have seen in the emissions or in the carbon market is that over the last years we have relatively limited carbon prices. So they are hovering around five euros per tonne of carbon dioxide. And that of course has given a huge debate on how effective is the emissions trading system really in order to bring down emissions. Why are we having such a low price? One of the reasons is that we had the economic crisis in Europe and production levels were falling. So the amount of allocation was higher than what was really required. And that led to an overhang in terms of the certificates that were distributed. Plus, we allowed in the last phase still the import of emission reduction credits from developing countries, the so called CDM projects. And the companies brought in about 1.5 gigatons of those credits over the past years and that led to the overhang. Over the last two, three years we have been discussing ways on how we can reduce that surplus in the market. And we have come up with what is called a market stability reserve. So if there is too many allowances above a certain threshold in the market, they will be moved into that market stability reserve. So that the liquidity in the market is being reduced and we should gradually see an increase in price. And that is also something that is very vividly discussed at the present point in time between Parliament and the European Council. These are the co-legislators in Europe. They want to make the system even tougher. They want to cancel certificates that are stuck in the market stability reserve. And that would help building up the market. Apart from that, in the new system we will also try to earmark a certain amount of funding, particularly for innovation. So 450 million allowances are going to be set aside in order to create an innovation fund and that should help in research and technology development in the energy sector and also in the industrial sector. So the two sectors that have obligations under the emissions trading system. And then there's a specific fund that is being proposed and that is for the lower income member states, so central and eastern Europe, who still have to make major steps in transitioning their energy sectors to help them to modernize their sectors. So in that way, also the revenue that is being generated by the emissions trading system is being used to help the transition that transformation. One particular aspect which is always coming up from the industry is the issue of competitiveness. And it's particularly for industry that is subject to international trade. So steel industry, ceramics, and these companies do not have to participate in the auctioning. They get their allowances under the system for free in order to shelter them from that international competitiveness pressure. And we will maintain that also until the year 2030 because we don't think that the commitments taken under the Paris Agreement are going to give that level playing field to all those industries. This is again how the credits that will be handed out will be given for free and auctioned. You see the upper part is the auctioning part that is going to reduce and also the free allocation to the industry is going to reduce until the year 2030. Now we come to the effort sharing. And that is the sectors that are outside the emissions trading system. And here we do not have a kind of a unified system among all the member states. But what we do is we allocate targets to all the individual member states. So, and that we will have to do in a way that it is fair to the member states that it allows for environmental integrity. And it's also cost efficient. And what do I mean when I say fair here? If you look at the now still 28 member states in future, 27 member states of the EU, they are economically at very different stages. The poorest country, Bulgaria, faces a very different situation compared to Luxembourg, which is the richest country. So the capacity to make transformations in those sectors is very different. And that is something that needs to be recognized when you hand out targets to the individual member states. You will have to look at their financial capability of doing things. So what is being done is that first of all, we have a range of targets and that is kept at 0 and 40%. They will add up to minus 30% compared to 2005. And the targets for individual member states are set on the basis of the GDP per capita of those member states in the year 2013. With some little correction for the higher member states at the upper end, but that is maybe not that important. Here you can see how steep these targets are going to be for the individual member states. And you can clearly see here on the left hand side is the richest member state, Luxembourg, but also Sweden, who have targets up to minus 40%. And on the right hand side here you see Bulgaria, Romania, and Latvia, who are the poorest member states, who can maintain the emissions where they were in the year 2005. So that is the architecture in order to assign those targets. But what we also have in the legislation is a possibility, because if you want to be cost efficient, are flexibilities. And that flexibility means that we do not expect Luxembourg necessarily to accomplish all the reductions in Luxembourg. Oops, stand for network registration it says. Oops, no, I can't bring that back. Maybe I continue, okay, good, thank you. The risk with allocating targets on the basis of GDP per capita is that you will not end up with a cost efficient solution. Because what we see at the same time is that the countries with a lower income per capita are the economies where you can have a higher mitigation potential at lower cost. So if you give those countries a lower target and you are not going to realize those emission reductions, you will not end up with a cost efficient solution for all of them at the end of the day. So in order to allow for a cost efficient solution, we have a possibility of trading between the member states. So member states who are rich on this side, like Luxembourg, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, they could do investments in countries like Bulgaria or Poland potentially reduce emissions there, get credited for it and in that way achieve their emission reduction target. So the architecture allows for a cost efficient achievement of the overall target of minus 30%. It's quite interesting the discussion that is taking place in the member states because many of the member states do not really make use of that kind of flexibility. And there's a whole discussion on going on whether taxpayers' money should be spent in a neighboring country, yes or no. So that is kind of a discussion that is happening. So you see many countries who try to accomplish their targets, even if they will have to pay per ton of CO2 much more than what you would have to pay if you would do these emission reductions in the other countries. That might work at the moment, but it will go increasingly more difficult in the coming years. So I believe that this flexibility is probably going to be used in future much more, particularly if you will ask finance ministers on how to deal with that. That brings me to the end of these two pieces of legislation. I'm not going to talk about land use today. I said I wanted to come to energy and particularly the renewables. At the present point in time in renewables, we have nationally binding targets for individual member states. When we were preparing for the new legislation in 2030, many member states were against having these kind of binding targets also in the future. But despite the fact that the renewables policies in Europe were very effective. As you can see in the lower graph on how fast renewable energy was growing in the portfolio in Europe and that I think all member states are on track to meet their targets. Still implementing these targets is something that is for member states to be done. So you will find 28 very different renewables policies in Europe because every member state does it in a different way. The Germans use what is called feed-in tariffs. The Swedes are using what is called green certificates. And I think there were studies done in the past also by the OACD looking at okay, you might be effective in terms of accomplishing your target, but how efficient are you in accomplishing your target? And there were a lot of backlashes over the last years, particularly with the economic recession in Europe, because some of the member states they thought we can use the public budgets in order to implement the renewables policies by dishing out sufficient subsidies or tax credits in our countries. But some countries were unable to pay those things like Spain for instance and they had to roll back their policy completely. And of course that upsets all private investors and all private investment in those countries. And even in Germany, one of the richest economies in Europe, you have a huge discussion on why is it so expensive to roll out the renewables. Because the feed-in tariff guarantees a price for every kilowatt hour you put into the grid or even if you don't put it into the grid you are paid for it. And that creates a huge liability for the next 20 years. From the commission side we have started looking into these things because we think it's a wasteful use of public money or a wasteful use of consumers money. And we have said we need to get some more market orientation into it. So the first thing we did from the competition side to say, you need to get out with tenders for the renewables if you want to achieve those targets. In the beginning of course there was member states were shouting at the commission, how is that possible and can we really do it? And in how far are we meeting our technology objectives we have? But over the last years it has shown that yes indeed prices were coming down in these tenders, in these public tenders that have been done. And it's now I think accepted across Europe that tendering, so proper public procurement is going to help to reduce the cost of the renewable roll out for the consumers. So also now in the face until the year 2030, we will not have national targets any longer, we'll have an EU wide target. And member states have to propose what they are going to do and then we'll see whether it is going to end up at the end of the day. So that is what is happening on the renewable side and the discussion we have in Europe. Energy efficiency, again you can see here in terms of how energy efficiency was improving, we have a headline target on energy efficiency but then we have a plethora of legislation in order to really improve energy efficiency. And that includes echo design. So that is what you do with your white goods, setting standards for washing machines, TV sets, hoovers and so on. But also when it comes to the transport sector, the CO2 and cars is an efficiency standard in order to get that down. The challenges ahead are that we have still a huge untapped potential. And we have a very difficult sector in order to improve the energy efficiency and that's the building sector. Those of you who have traveled to Europe will know that we have many old buildings in Europe, many old houses that still need to be renovated. We have a renovation rate about 1% per year. So it will take us 100 years to have a total turnover. But that is not going to be good enough for the future. So the proposal that is out there to improve energy efficiency by 30% also has a proposal for buildings and renovation rates. And the objective is to try to decarbonize completely the building sector by the year 2050. So that is the quadrupling of the annual rate that you require in order to get there and that is a really tough target. In particular, if you talk to house owners who own these old houses and we shall see how this is going to be discussed in the council and also in the European Parliament. So that is another very challenging area. And again, it relies very much on the action at the end of the day, at the level of each of the member state. Now I wanted to say a final few words about the, I will keep out the transport sector and the fuels policy and the fluorinated gases and the waste. But we are doing things in all of that. What we found very important is that you also look around in other major policy areas what you need to do in order to push forward climate policies. And just give you two examples here. One is the skills agenda on the right hand side where we talk about how is our workforce needing to change over the coming years. For instance, if you want to have the energy efficient houses that you are looking for, then it means you will have to train your workers. So that is something we are trying to bring through the skills agenda into our climate policy. Another area is what is called here the Capital Markets Union, which really started out as after the last recession and the financial crisis in the banking sector. How we can keep our banks alive and also for the future not to make the same mistakes as in the past. There is question here around carbon disclosure. So reporting of what is your asset that you administer? And that's particularly important for big insurance companies or companies that handle the pension funds. So that is something that is being looked at in that context. And the other thing which is a novelty and very successful in the financial market is the so-called green bonds. But nobody knows are they dark green or half green or light green or brown green or black green or whatever. So there is an advisory board that is thinking of can we set some kind of standards there or some kind of rating on how good these green bonds are. They have been helping raising a lot of money over the last couple of years, particularly for projects in the area of renewables and energy efficiency. So what I want to say here is that if you want to do climate policies, you need to look at all the different sectors across the economy. It's not only one which is climate and energy only, but it also affects the others. And you need to look at many other pieces and that includes also the public budget. But I'm not going to talk about that today. One other thing just to keep in mind, we are also thinking in Europe about adaptation. So I'm not going to look into that right now. But just to say that is what we are looking at. Little outlook at the end, we will, with our commitments that we have taken under Paris, see a further significant reduction of our greenhouse gases. We will become probably the most efficient or greenhouse gas efficient major economy. You see here on the right-hand side the graph at the top, the EU 28, in terms of the efficiency of the economy, which is for us also important as an overall objective when it comes to our growth and jobs agenda to become productive and more productive in the future. Internationally, we know the job is unfinished. Even with our minus 40% target at least, there is a lot more that will have to be done. So I'm just going to say that we are fully aware of that. Now with the stance taken by the new administration, that's probably going to be much harder. But still, we'll have to do a lot more together internationally in the future. And with that, I want to conclude my talk. So thank you, Arthur, for such a great overview. Stage that here and for also finishing ahead of schedule. So we have a bit more time than normal for questions. Any questions? Usually we start with the students who usually sit in the back. Any student questions? No student questions? There we go. Oh, wow. The student is actually sitting in the front. Has a price floor been considered for the carbon trade market in the European Union? Yes, kind of, you have a price floor even in one of the member states. That is the UK. They have administered that, but as you all know, your textbooks very well. It's totally ineffective if you work in a larger market because you might reduce your emissions in the UK, but overall in Europe, it would not have any kind of major impact. It makes it just cheaper for Poland in order to cover their emissions from the coal plants. We have not, let's say we have been considering whether we should have a floor price in Europe as well. And we are against that because what we really want to accomplish is the reduction of the emissions, so the quantities. So therefore, we would rather take more action as you have tried to explain on the market stability reserve where you take out certificates out of the market instead of playing around with a price corridor. We rather think that it's the market who should find the price and then we will see is that price efficient to guide innovation and if not, then we will have to do something about the amount of certificates in the market. Yes, ma'am. Since then, 1990 was the baseline for emissions reduction, the 40% etc. What's the baseline here for energy efficiency? For energy efficiency, there is no baseline. Or let's say the baseline there is a baseline curve which shows in the year, I think it was made in the year 2007 where our energy consumption would go. So that was a business as usual curve and from that we are subtracting. So it's an imaginary curve from which we are subtracting and then we get to this. But what it means in real terms is that we will have to see a reduction of energy consumption in Europe and that is what is actually happening. Okay, we have one here and two over there. Yes, ma'am. What policies are being used to increase energy efficient retrofits in buildings? What policies? Energy efficient something in buildings? In buildings, retrofitting buildings. Oh, retrofits. Again, this is not something that is being dealt with at the level of the EU. This is being implemented by individual member states and what they do is, for instance, having tax credits helping owners to renovate. But then also you have building codes that are being set at the national level which means you have to have double glazing in certain parts of Europe but it's very much determined by each of the individual member states and the reason is very simple. The situation for a building in Spain is very different from one in Northern Finland and it's the governments of those countries who are best placed to make then these very individual standards when it comes to renovation. The other thing that is being used is support programs so interest rate reductions for mortgages for renovations. So this is also a tool that is being used in quite a number of member states. Over on the left-hand side, we had a couple of markers. How is current EU climate policy accounting for possibly the desertification of southern, of some parts of southern Europe? Again, the... So the climate policy, how is it accounting for the possible desertification? Desertification, yeah. Okay, that is the adaptation question. Again, when it comes to adaptation that is a very local issue. So the ones who are governing on that is the member states and then when it comes to adaptation even the regional governments. And they are at very different stages. The graph or the map I could have shown is how many national adaptation plans are in place. What we see is around the Mediterranean Sea, I think all the member states by now have adaptation strategies and plans in place because desertification is going to be a major issue. If you look at countries like Spain, if you look at southern Italy, even southern France, if you look at the Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania, where you will have major problems in terms of desertification. I think we have one more back here. Maybe just to say from the European side the support comes through regional funds which are there to improve the cohesion of the living standards of the Europeans so member states can use those funds to assist in adapting to climate change. Could you maybe briefly talk about the agricultural changes you hope to see and how different or how you think that different nations will tackle those issues? The agricultural challenges are very different again in Europe. What you will see is in the Mediterranean area, so Spain, which is at the moment highly productive agriculturally when it comes to the production of vegetables for the North, particular during the winter season because they will have much greater water shortages. So that is something they will have to deal with. How can they improve their irrigation systems, make them even more productive than in the past? We will have the middle part in Europe like Germany and Poland where you will get warmer winters and at the same time probably have wetter summers. So that is going to change the crop production pattern a little bit so you will have to adapt the varieties that you are growing in those areas. And then if you go further North, Finland, Sweden, there you will see a prolongation of the agricultural season. So they probably will have gains in terms of productivity in the short and medium term. In the longer term, we'll have to see on which direction it is actually going to go. Overall, in terms of the total adding up to all the things, I think Europe is not going to benefit or Europe's agriculture is not going to benefit from climate change because many of the very productive regions in the South and also in France are going to be affected negatively. I think we had one in the center here, way in the back and then over here on the other. Yes sir, way in the back. So given the fact that in years to come, it's mostly developing nations and contributing to total climate emissions more than Europe or even the US, what do you think the role of the EU system is like on the global stage? Is like the ETS, like other policies, are they supposed to inspire other countries to pursue similar policies? Other things that EU is trying to do to spread its policies to other parts of the world? What do you think is role is? No, I think the role is as the Indian negotiator was once mentioning to me, he said what we want from Europe is the power of the example. You need to show that it can work and only then we will embark on what we will have to do and I think that has been happening over the last 15 to 20 years. We have seen the technologies coming out of the labs, getting into practice, getting scaled up. Just look at the story around wind and solar. Prices for those technologies have come down so they also now become affordable for many developing countries. Look at India's plan to really roll out solar in a big way, the same with China. So it's the role of the Europeans is to still show what can be done. I think that's also the role of the United States. Yeah, usually, yeah. On the aisle and then... So I was curious about the balance between reductions under the market mechanism versus effort sharing. Given the track record of ETS so far, there seems to be a very heavy reliance on the ETS. Like here in California, we've put most of our eggs in other baskets around complementary policies. Can you explain some of the thinking behind that reliance and if there are any insurance mechanisms in case problems continue to crop up? Yes, and maybe I didn't explain when the graph was on the screen. What we expect the ETS to deliver until 2030 is minus 43%. Emission reduction is compared to 2005 while the sectors outside the ETS are supposed to do 30%. So the question now is why should the ETS do more? The reason is that when we looked into the mitigation potential in the energy sector and also the industrial sector and the cost of it, it's still higher than in the sectors outside the ETS. So therefore we expect the ETS sectors to deliver more. What is the insurance here? If you exceed your emission cap, you will have to pay 100 euros per tonne of carbon dioxide. And that is quite a big incentive for companies to make sure that they stay under the cap. And that is what we have seen. We have released the latest emission figures for the ETS only about a week ago. And what you will see is that companies have met the cap, so they are below the cap. And we have seen even some interesting developments like quite a reduction in emissions from coal again, which there was a little kind of ditch and it was going up a little bit and people were already starting to wonder, is there a renaissance of coal in the electricity generation in Europe? The year 2016, definitely it was going the other way. Minus 12%, I think it was for greenhouse gas emissions from coal under the ETS. And the reason for that is that prices, the price differential between gas and coal has become much, much, much closer over the last 12 to 15 months. General and Spiers. Is there any discussion currently around kind of a border adjustment tax or are there any particular countries that are more or less in favor? We have a huge number of academics who discuss border adjustment tax, definitely and that for a long time. It's still very vivid in the discussions in France, in particular, that is something that is being looked at. We also had recently, in the whole discussions in the parliament, there was a kind of border tax mechanism coming up again, particularly for the cement industry in Europe, but even the cement industry came running and said, no, no, no, we don't want that. At the end of the day, kind of from, at least from the European Commission side, we are not in favor of border adjustment taxes, despite the fact that you have an article in the ETS directive that speaks about border tax adjustment. We have one in the middle back here and then John. Yeah, all these numbers you're talking about are very much like what's admitted within the EU. Do you talk at all about like using consumption-based emissions and also taking account of the industries, the stuff we buy from outside the EU? No, the way, of course, we are looking at this is on how we have negotiated it internationally and how we have made our commitments. And that is based on your national territory and what the production is and what the emissions that come out of that. Consumption-based approaches that has been discussed and is being discussed constantly. And we also support research in order to better understand does it really lead to relocation of production from Europe? Because that's also an argument that's been used by industry saying you put up the price for carbon in Europe but what is going to happen is we will just move into other areas where environmental standards might even lower. We haven't observed any of that at the present point in time and I don't think that internationally we will be moving to consumption-based metrics. And just give you a little anecdote. A few years ago I was on a panel with a Chinese colleague talking about climate policies in Washington, Stuart Eisenstadt was inviting us for that. And he was going on in his presentation on how China is the workbench of the rest of the world and that 30% of China's emissions are really due to the consumption in the industrialized countries. And my only response is okay, if we decide internationally we do consumption-based, I would be the happiest man under the sun. But you also will have to give me the responsibility and the regulatory responsibility to deal with that because I will give you the emissions trading system tomorrow. And that was the end of the argument. John, John Masters. Couple questions. You talked about the difference of country policies on buildings and so forth. So question one was do any of the countries have net zero of rules for new houses either in progress? Second one is what sort of progress is there towards electric vehicles and that? And the third one is, since you mentioned gas cold prices, can you address the geopolitical issues with Russian gas? We'll give you some easy questions. Yes, and they are all going into the same direction. Okay, on the new houses we have EU legislation which says that at a certain point in time we will only allow passive houses. And that is going to be 2025 if I'm not mistaken. So that is relatively soon. But that is not going to solve our problem when it comes to emissions from the housing sector because we have all these old houses that are standing there. Many of them are really beautiful but in terms of energy efficiency they are wasteful. So that is something that we really have to tackle now. The second question was on transport electric vehicles. If you talk to a producer of vehicles in Europe they all say, yes we have them already and they are in the showroom and nobody wants to buy them. So we still have a huge price differential as here in the US. So it is again member states who start with incentive programs where they give a big tax rebate like 5,000 euros if you buy an electric vehicle. But even that the uptake is relatively limited. So at the present point in time as part of the whole overhaul of the European legislation for Paris we are also looking at what should be the efficiency standards or the CO2 standards for cars after 2021. In 2021 they should be at 95 grams per kilometer which is somewhere around 55 or so miles per gallon something or 65 miles per gallon. And how steep do we have to go in order to push electric vehicles into the market? So is a question we are assessing at the moment in our impact assessments and also what type of policy design should we use? Is it sufficient to have just a single CO2 standard or do we need like California has a sales mandate for electric vehicles, yes or no? So these are questions that we are looking at at the present point in time. The Russian gas issue, what is important for Europe is diversification when it comes to the gas market. And I think this is happening in terms of the investments we have seen of the last 15 years in LNG terminals around in Europe that has changed the picture completely. All the new investments that have been done in the links to North Africa, to Algeria for instance. This is something that is working. And then I think the amount of gas that has come to the market internationally that has helped to reduce the dependence from Russian gas. A big question still is gas from going to be able to get into the European market. That's a very political question. They try to buy certain gas distributors in Europe. So this is something where we are very cautious. The whole issue about pipelines and what are the conditions on how to operate those pipelines. This is something you will have read that just now our competition department is likely to have a deal with gas problems so that they have to take quite a number of the conditions out of their contracts so they can no longer command Bulgaria to only import the Russian gas but not be able to resell it to their neighbors. So all these kind of restrictions should fall over time. Well, I see we're out of time. I'd like to thank Arthur one more time for giving such a big, inspiring and hopeful talk in these trying times. Arthur, thank you. Thank you.


Yes, so for me obviously focusing on confidential computing, I think this is just going to be similar to how, you know, no network was encrypted 10 years ago and today every network is encrypted with TLS and HTTPS and how, you know, five years ago no disk was encrypted and today every disk is encrypted with this encryption. The one missing piece is memory. Memory is where data is exposed now. I think within a few years all memory is going to be encrypted and it's just going to change two industries, the security industry as well as the computer industry.


Your network is as effective as your education level to your success and in societies where women might be, not have really the opportunity to build the kind of networks that we can build in the United States, the idea is to bring women all from the same country so when they go home they have each other and then they can introduce each other to their colleagues and to their friends and their family and thereby broaden their network.


Russia to modernize Moscow's air defense systems. Russian Defense Ministry announced plans to modernize anti-missile defense systems in the capital, Moscow, after a series of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian territory. Several air defense systems have appeared on rooftops around Moscow this year. This year, we will complete the modernization of the anti-missile defense system of the city of Moscow. Russian Defense Minister Shoigu told. He said that developing the air defense weapons was one of the priorities for the army. Shoigu said the army would also form an air defense division brigade that will be trained and equipped with new generation S-350 air-to-ground missile systems. He did not say if these were new plans or if they were related to the conflict in Ukraine. Drone attacks on Russian territory and on Moscow annexed Crimea have increased in recent months, more than a year into the Kremlin's Ukraine offensive. Recently, authorities in Crimea claimed the Russian Navy repelled a drone attack in the port of Sevastopol. Last month, a drone attempted to strike a facility in the Moscow region.


My 81 year old mother recently got her first tattoo and took her first ride on a Harley Davidson So I thought to myself what can I do to push myself outside of my comfort zone and the answer was make a beat Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you will using loops and samples is not normally the way I go about creating music I'm much more of an acoustic guitar and lyrics kind of guy and I'll usually embellish that with more Acoustic sounding instruments, so I decided to push myself outside of my comfort zone by making a beat with all that that Implies now I had about five hours to do this So it was all done in kind of a rush and you may have expected that I would start off with the drums And I thought I was going to do that, but at the very last minute I decided to start off with the keys so want to introduce you to the star of the show 40s Very own keys. This is a library from native instruments and it's a collection of sounds put together from the producer 40 who most famously has worked with Drake and I really wanted to use this because it lends itself to a kind of Lo-fi down tempo kind of piece, which is what I wanted to go for on this occasion Now the way this library works is each preset is made up of two different samples created by 40 And for example with this Cambridge Legion piano preset, which I've got loaded up here It's made up of a square saw, which is the a Sample and then a piano sound on the B. Okay. Now that sounds like this You don't have to stick with the two sounds which are there in the preset you can swap them out So I could go to this piano sound over here and swap it out for example with Let's go for rep keys, whatever that is and now I've got something which sounds like this Yeah, so as well as swapping out the sounds you can then go into this sound tab here And you can adapt each of the samples so you can Change the envelope the modulation envelope amplitude envelope there as well as a whole bunch of other controls there to adapt That sound and really come up with your own sound now the way I went about things was to go for one of the presets, which is the Ford keys preset Okay, and I didn't like the I wasn't keen on the a sound so I swapped it out for this a sound which is BLF and I ended up with this sound here Now I just played one chord there, but you kind of heard a second pulse. Have a listen again Yeah, now that's what attracted me to this particular sound And that's why I went ahead and used as my key sort of my key sound my key sound For the whole piece now I played at this point a random chord progression I don't really know where it came from, but I liked it right away And I think it set the sort of mellow almost I'm going to say spooky tone to this particular piece of music and the chord progression was this So that set the basis for everything I was going to do and the next thing I wanted to work on was the drums So before I go into which drum sounds I used and how I put the drums together I just wanted to quickly mention you're going to see me using the machine the plus from native instruments This is an amazing piece of kit which you can create whole pieces of music on like this stand alone without the need of a computer as such But in this case I did have it hooked up to my computer because I really love the feel of the pads on this piece of gear I'm not going to talk about it too much now but do check the links in the description and find out about the machine Now the library that I was using this time was another 40s own library 40s own drums again from native instruments along the same kind of theme Really suitable in my opinion for this sort of down tempo sometimes lo-fi kind of style Now I just went through the different kits first off and sort of auditioned them like so this is the fuller park drums Yeah moving on something here DFA kit another one here Queen Alley Kit And I eventually found the one I wanted we'll look at that in a moment But I also want to mention you can of course change the overall sound just like you could with the keys And you can go in and swap out different parts of the kit to put together your own custom kit And furthermore you can then change the sound of each of the samples using the controls here Okay, so I ended up using sort of an adapted version of this 312 basement kit Okay, now when I went ahead to sort of program the drums or play the drums People who have watched my channel before know that I do do it in a specific way And that is to play different parts of the kit rather than try and play all the kit at the same time I'm just not dexterous enough on drum pads to do that and it may not even be possible with this particular Rhythm that I came up with but the first thing I wanted to do was play the hi-hat Now I wanted them the hi-hat to be reasonably regular But I wanted to have some sort of subtle sort of almost ghost notes in there as well Which is what you're gonna hear So as I say I started off by recording the hi-hat and this kind of metal sound that was in the kit And it sounded like this when I played it So that created a bassist there and then I went ahead and played the kick and snare sounds along with some other Percussive sounds and this is what I did there Now in the spirit of this kind of way of making music, I pretty much just looped that drum beat Throughout the whole piece of music. There were some slight variations I did something different in the intro later on and then towards the end what I did was I used this control on the plug-in the delay control here and I kind of Randomly pushed it up and down and that created some interesting sort of sub beat So have a listen to that as I push this delay control up here And that essentially is all there was to the drums So for the bass sound I went back to 40s very own keys again There's a nice collection of bass sounds in there and what I ended up choosing was this Bootsy bass sound Okay, which sounds like this Yeah, just nice sort of thumping low-end in there But with a little bit of grit in there as well now in terms of the sound The only thing I did was go into my EQ here in Kate Walk on the Pro channel And I actually did a bit of a boost quite a reasonable boost actually at just above 50 Hertz there Okay, so I really wanted to push the limits of the low end here Okay We don't often find us of pushing this these types of sounds at the low end down there in this way Did I go too far? You can let me know in the comments down below about that when you hear the final piece But it was just sounding good to me and I did want to push the limits with it a little bit So that's the only thing I did to the sound of this instrument at all Now the key thing for me was that the bass was going to have a relationship with the drums Particularly with the kick drum now I say a relationship because I think perhaps we can get confused about this It doesn't have to be playing on exactly the same beats but perhaps some more of the important beats So let's have a listen to what I came up with in terms of just the bass and the drums together So it's kind of tapping into some of the variations that I actually have with the kick And let's just have a quick listen to how it sounds with the keys we already had So that's my basic vibe and now I had to add a bunch of other stuff Now I continue to use forties very own keys to create some layers of sounds Okay, these elements which came in and out of the song at different points But also sometimes they were all played together The first thing was this sort of motif here, which I called the spooky riff and it sounded like this Okay, the next thing that I added I wanted something with a bit more aggression to it Okay, so with a bit of grit to it. So I came up with this sort of lead line here It's sort of approaching an electric guitar sound or a distorted guitar sound there And then finally I wanted to add in this piano, which was gonna be almost like a march of doom That's the way I was thinking of it anyway, but it had this very ploddy sort of sound to it Okay, the piano sound and it sounded like this So that very almost monotonous Rhythm to it now all of those three together sounded like this And then in with the final piece of music they sounded like this Now you've always got to be careful in my opinion when doing this is about gauging when you've done too much But definitely none of these pieces are really about something that you're gonna focus in on as a listener Okay, they're creating textures and layers and also give me an ability to create Dynamics in the piece of music by sort of adding them in and taking them away Now at this point I still felt that need to have a kind of an acoustic instrument in there I gave into my inertia, but rather than grab my guitar and sell up a microphone and record my guitar I went for this library from Native Instruments the picked nylon library I just wanted to have something right at the beginning in the intro Which kind of got us into the mood along with our original keys Okay, now this library is great if you want that kind of nylon guitar sound and very easy to get something sounding very very cool Because it kind of plays itself Oh, for example playing a minor chord here and I'll end up getting this Of course, it's tempo matched To whatever you're doing so it's pretty easy to get the something pretty good going on In my case, I wanted something which had a bit of rhythm to it. So I went for calm See, okay, which sounded like this Now as well as having that kind of sound I wanted to mess it up a bit. Okay, so it wasn't sounding too natural So for that I used a plugin from isotype called vinyl. This is a free plugin And this is where you can kind of mess things up and make them sound as though they're being played on a record And I guess that was just to give me some contrast what was going to come in a little bit later, which was much cleaner More produced sound. Okay. So and it also just I don't know for some reason made this sound like a dreamy kind of memory feel at the beginning I had to add something else a bit later on to give it that but you'll get the idea when you hear the final piece Let's have a listen to how this guitar sounded in the intro with that vinyl plugin as well So that's how I messed up a really nice sounding guitar So at this point I was a little bit stuck. I really wanted some female vocal on this piece of music But I didn't have access to my vocalist nor time to record her either and I just Didn't like the alternatives now I was chatting to my good friend Ricky T brown and he suggested a little bit of a workaround stroke Cheat for me, which I was hesitant to use at first But I must say I'm glad I did because it took me in a direction. I wouldn't have gone in myself He suggested a plugin called arcade from output Now what this does once you insert it into your project it hooks up to its library on the internet You put in a key signature and a tempo and it gives you a whole bunch of vocal samples which are going to Automatically fit your piece of music sounds like cheating because it is cheating But nonetheless, I was pretty happy with the result. So I started off with this one It's called I got you this this particular preset. Okay, and if I just press one key On my keyboard, you'll hear one of the phrases from this little preset Here's another one So obviously you can combine those in any order you want to come up with something I hesitate to use unique But at least the the arrangement of them is unique now There's also some other keys on here the black keys which actually change the sound in some way so we could play this sound Those keys just mess around with it. I didn't use any of those features I just use the basic phrases and this is what I came up with initially Oh Now I wanted to do something which people often ask me about I wanted the last part of the phrases to have a delay effect on But in my case just one delay rather than use any delay plugins or anything like that I did it the very simple way I just duplicated the track and then I repeated those phrases And then on that track I put the volume a little bit Lower and just treated them a little bit differently. So I then ended up with this for the female vocal part Now I was really enjoying what I had so far, but then I thought Hmm, it'd be nice to have a male vocal to contrast this and something with a little bit more sort of lyrical content in it Now to cut a long story short I used exactly the same plugin for the male vocals I used a preset called always crying and this is what I came up with A weird phenomena for me kind of occurred although I was playing sort of random phrases of lyrics It kind of felt like they went together and as if they may have been written that way Do you agree with me? Do they sound convincing in that way? I don't know they do to me Let me know what you think in the comments down below now. I kept hearing harmony in there I just the more I listened to I thought I've got to have a harmony in there So initially I thought I'll do it the easy way I will just duplicate this track and using melodyne a pitch correction plugin I will change the pitch and create the harmony on the fly Well, listen to how that turned out Okay-ish But didn't like it sounded way too robotic to me. Maybe I could have messed around with it a bit more But I thought uh, what the hell I've got a microphone right in front of me Why don't I just sing the harmony which exactly is exactly what I did and it sounded like this Now the observant amongst observant amongst you will have noticed that I processed my harmony vocals Quite heavily in fact, so let me give you an idea of the signal chain For those vocals. I started off with my eq Just adding in quite a bit of high end down here So a massive high end boost to create some airiness in there. Okay. I then actually use this plugin I could use this before I did that eq abuse, but I just use this enhanced eq plugin from rave instruments to just to boost Around about one half There's no there was no real need for me to do that It was just initially what I went for Before I'd used the built-in one with cakewalk now I also use this plugin from native instruments called coral kind of like a chorus effect Is added to it there and then I use this plugin again from native instruments a bit of a theme here I think they're all just there together But I use this to really sort of degrade The signal is a great little plugin if you want to do that and Make things perhaps sound like they were recorded a lower bit depth, etc And then finally to add some reverb kind of effect in there. I use this plugin from native instruments called Rome, I guess it's called So let's have a listen to that by itself. I'll solo that you can hear the final result with that signal chain And then in with the original vocal I've been changing So we get quite a nice spacious effect there overall Which is what I was going for and I wanted that harmony to kind of fit the style of that original vocal as well So let's have a listen to the final piece and you can let me know in the comments down below whether I succeeded in my task Now when you do get towards the end of the piece a thumbnail is going to come up on the screen That's going to take you to a playlist Where I run through the complete process of me recording a song from beginning to end in detail And then releasing it to the world