The Russian attack on Ukraine highlighted the European Union’s dependence on third-country supplies of high-carbon energy sources, such as natural gas. The invasion, coupled with the preceding period of high energy prices (starting in autumn 2021), led to the EU shifting its focus from decarbonisation and the employment of low-carbon (renewable) energy sources to external carbon security – security of supplies of high-carbon fossil energy sources, especially natural gas, from third countries. Natural gas plays a crucial role in the energy systems of many EU member states and is considered a key support for the gradual decarbonization of their economies. Indeed, after the invasion of Ukraine, Russian gas was replaced with gas from other sources rather than being substituted with other, low-carbon energy sources. Decarbonisation is a gradual process, and natural gas plays an important role in it. Although not a straightforward one, as its role within the EU has also been questioned, especially in connection to the EU taxonomy of ‘green’ sources, together with nuclear. This research examines the positions of the EU institutions, in particular the European Commission, and member states on the role of natural gas in the decarbonisation of the EU following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and whether these actors support creating a common approach towards natural gas suppliers from third countries (i.e., external carbon security). It is based on more than 50 interviews with the representatives of the European Commission and member states conducted between Autumn 2025 and Summer 2026.

One decade after the Dieselgate scandal, the European Union still faces the structural consequences of a regulatory failure that was not merely legal or political, but epistemic. Dieselgate showed that compliance with EU emissions rules rested on measurements that were formally valid yet environmentally misleading, revealing the fragility of sustainability governance built on uncertain metrics.

This paper revisits Dieselgate to analyse the EU’s current predicament in climate and sustainability regulation, at a moment when regulatory ambition is being recalibrated under the banner of “simplification” and competitiveness. Rather than framing Dieselgate primarily as an enforcement failure, the paper argues that its deeper legacy lies in the instability of measurement itself. Emissions were not simply manipulated; they were generated through testing regimes unable to capture real-world conditions in a consistent and comparable way.

Post-Dieselgate reforms, including on-road testing and stronger EU-level scientific involvement, have improved transparency but have not resolved this core problem. The resulting regulatory architecture remains fragmented, characterised by flexible testing parameters, heterogeneous data sources, and uneven national enforcement. While steps towards centralisation have been taken, no single institutional actor has assumed clear ownership of the measurement framework underpinning sustainable mobility.

The paper argues that this unresolved measurement problem is now re-emerging in the transition to hybrid and fully electric vehicles. New sustainability indicators (such as lifecycle emissions, battery production, and energy sourcing) are even harder to measure and standardise than tailpipe emissions were a decade ago. Uncertainty thus remains a structural feature of regulatory design rather than a temporary technical deficit.

Against this background, the paper questions the logic of weakening Green Deal requirements before clarifying what can be reliably measured. It concludes that the central challenge for EU sustainability (mobility) governance is not only how much to regulate, but what can credibly be known and compared across Member States. Without treating measurement as a governance problem in its own right, regulatory simplification risks undermining trust and weakening the EU’s capacity to steer the next phase of the green transition.

The spread of misinformation and disinformation about climate change and climate policies poses significant challenges for all actors addressing this urgent issue. With its ambitious climate goals and agenda, both within its borders and internationally, the European Union is an attractive target for climate-related misinformation and disinformation aimed at obstructing and hindering climate action, understanding these activities through the lenses of foreign interference. This paper aims to investigate how prominently the EU perceives the problem of climate misinformation and disinformation, and which actors are seen as responsible for spreading it. The study adopts the institutional and agenda-setting perspective using qualitative content analysis of political debates in distinct EU bodies. The analysis is applied to the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of the EU (CEU). The focus on the former answers the call of the new intergovernmentalism approach to examine the EP´s role in European integration in the post-Maastricht period, whereas the latter offers a comparative perspective on intergovernmental and supranational institutions of equal weight in the ordinary legislative procedure. Since the qualitative content analysis is applied, the research covers the medium-long period of 10 years (2015-2025). The analysis symbolically starts with the year when the Paris Agreement, the landmark in climate change mitigation policies, was adopted.

Early literature on the European Parliament typically identified it as an environmental champion that could be relied upon to strengthen Commission environmental policy proposals, to allow access to green NGOs, and to provide opportunities for the election of green party representatives. It was suggested that extending the power of the EP via the ordinary legislative procedure (OLP) was important in securing democratic input into policies and in bolstering environmental ambition. Moreover, the combination of the high salience of climate change and strong performance of the Green Group in the 2019 European Parliament elections led many to expect that the ninth European Parliament (EP) session would be characterised by high environmental ambition. Indeed, von der Leyen’s pursuit of the European Green Deal was designed at least in part to secure the support of the chamber for her mandate as Commission President.

However, the EP’s positions on a number of high profile files in EP9 and the growth of representation of the radical right in the 2024 to 2029 session (EP10), raise the question of whether the Parliament’s reputation as an environmental champion is outdated and it is now better viewed as an opponent of progressive environmental policy. Some authors have advanced a more nuanced view, suggesting that the EP has been prepared to support climate legislation under the EGD but has taken a harder position on nature and chemicals policy. These arguments raise the prospect that the EP remains a climate champion but is less reliable on other environmental legislation, begging the questions of whether, where and why the EP is prepared to strengthen or weaken the Commission’s environmental policy proposals.

This paper reviews the extant literature identifying the main planks of the argument that the EP is an environmental champion and then tests the assumptions underpinning that conceptualisation against evidence from 2019 to 2026 encompassing the Parliament’s ninth term of office (EP9) and the first part of its tenth (EP10). The paper argues that the rise of the radical right and attendant shift to the right of the European People’s Party have been critical in shaping the positions adopted by the Parliament. It finds that whilst the empowerment of the Parliament may have historically led to greener legislation, that can no longer be taken for granted leading to important normative and strategic questions about the relationship between democracy and environmental ambition in the EU.

This research examines how populist political narratives in Italy construct dissatisfaction with EU climate policies, with particular attention to the period before and after the launch of the European Green Deal. As a country simultaneously vulnerable to climate risks and central to the rise of populism, Italy offers a crucial context for understanding how political discourse shapes domestic environmental governance. The study addresses two main questions: (1) how Italian populist actors frame EU climate legislation; and (2) how these narratives differ across parties in relation to their core ideologies and to moments of heightened issue salience or participation in government.

Focusing on three mainstream populist parties - the League (Lega), Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia), and the Five-Star Movement (Movimento Cinque Stelle) - the analysis draws on theories of populist ideology, party positioning on climate change, and the effects of populism on climate discourse and policy. To capture both a pre- and post-Green Deal timeframe, while accounting for the major transformation of the Italian party system in 2013, the dataset covers the period from 2013 to the present. The study employs qualitative content analysis (MAXQDA) of party communications and parliamentary speeches, drawing on the ItaParlCorpus dataset and manually scraped materials. A dictionary-based approach is used to examine how populist elements such as people-centrism and anti-elitism interact with left-right ideological orientations. In doing so, the analysis engages with ongoing debates on whether “thin” populist ideologies anchor themselves to “thick” left–right ideologies in shaping parties’ climate positions.

Whereas existing research has largely focused on right-wing parties or on quantitative correlations between populism and climate attitudes, this study offers an in-depth, comparative examination of three populist parties. Particular attention is paid to the Five-Star Movement, which - unlike the other cases - has alternated between opposition, government with right-wing parties, government with left-wing parties, and opposition again since 2013. This trajectory provides an ideal case for observing not only ideological but also strategic drivers of climate discourse. The analysis explores how climate narratives shift between opposition and government, and how coalition participation - especially with right-wing partners - affects discursive positioning. Semi-structured interviews with political representatives complement the textual analysis, helping to identify plausible explanations for observed shifts.

Overall, the study aims to clarify how left- and right-wing populist ideologies, alongside strategic considerations, shape national party responses to EU climate action, contributing to a more communicatively sensitive understanding of European climate policymaking.