14 Leaders The EconomistJune 29th 2019
T
he european uniongets a lot of flak. All right, it isn’t literal-
ly blasted with anti-aircraft fire, but you know what we
mean. One ongoing battle (ok, nobody died) involves the use of
words. Earlier this year, the European Parliament’s agriculture
committee voted to prohibit the terms “burger”, “sausage”, “esca-
lope” and “steak” to describe products that do not contain any
meat. It was inspired by the European Court of Justice’s decision
in 2017 to ban the use of “milk”, “butter” and “cream” for non-
dairy products. Exceptions were made for “ice cream” and “al-
mond milk”, but “soya milk” went down the drain, lest consum-
ers assume it had been extracted from the soya udder of a soya
cow. The court has yet to rule on the milk of human kindness.
Greens are mounting a campaign against the
committee’s decision, which they suspect is
supported not only by linguistic purists but also
by the meat industry. This newspaper thinks the
parliament is quite right to protect citizens from
the confusion they would no doubt feel were
they to find that no part of a “veggie burger” was
made of the flesh of a dead animal. Indeed, this
praiseworthy initiative needs to go further.
“Escalopes” pose a clear danger to consumers, who might
well recoil in horror when, taking a mouthful of one, they dis-
cover that it is made not of the scallops from which it got its
name but of chicken or veal. “Sausages” should refer only to
heavily salted meat, whence the term derives; for clarity, con-
sumers should be informed that the item is encased in animal
intestine. Steaks should be sold only on a pointed stick, on the
grounds that most shoppers will rely on the proto-Indo-Euro-
pean etymology. Any confusion could be avoided if kebabs were,
as their Arabic root suggests, always sold burned. The produc-
tion of burgers should be restricted to the butchers of Hamburg,
long ago deprived of their intellectual property by a shockingfailure of linguistic regulation. The same right should be extend-
ed to makers of Frankfurter sausages—sorry, meat-filled gut.
And “meat” itself should apply to all food, sweet or savoury,
which would make the term historically accurate, if useless.
Nor should the parliament’s reforming zeal be restricted to
food. Any reference to the European budget should be confined
to the money that the commissioner for economic and monetary
affairs, Valdis Dombrovskis, keeps on his person in a bougette, or
leather purse. Only those banks which carry out their business
on wooden benches (banco, in Italian) should be included in the
banking union. Discussion of computers should be limited to
clerks who do budgetary calculations, while that of the digital
single market should apply only to sums that
people can do on their fingers.
This linguistic rigour should be extended
through both time and space. The Holy Roman
Empire, as Voltaire pointed out, was neither
holy, nor Roman, nor an empire; La Manche has
no sartorial connections; the Mediterranean is
not the centre of the Earth; there is no horticul-
ture in the Big Apple. They need renaming.
Not all the union’s governing structures are taking their lin-
guistic responsibilities seriously enough. When earlier this year
Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, spoke of “con-
crete measures” to extend the single market and a “level playing
field”, listeners might reasonably have looked forward to a multi-
billion-euro infrastructure project to shift French and Italian
mountaintops to the low-lying bits around Brussels.
The Treaty of Rome speaks of the need to respect member
states’ culture (no, nothing to do with yogurt) and bind them to-
gether (please put the string away). In view of those aspirations,
Europe’s leaders need to get on board with this reform. Not liter-
ally, obviously. It’s not a ship. Never mind. 7Silly sausages
Europe defends itself against veggie burgersLanguage and the lawpower stations switch to natural gas. There is no point in some
states taking action if others do not bother, or if the federal gov-
ernment cannot get its act together, because energy markets do
not respect state boundaries. Besides, the targets are too distant:
they allow politicians to pose as green while pushing the costs of
action onto their successors.
These objections are too gloomy. A carbon price is indeed the
optimal way to reduce pollution, but getting people to pay for
carbon has been a vote-loser in America and Europe. In a world
of second- or third-best options, targets backed by credible plans
to reach them are reasonable. Emissions are indeed coming
down thanks to the fracking boom, but there is a limit to how far
they can fall if natural gas is the primary material from which
electricity is generated. Yes, the targets are far into the future, but
in New York’s case they come with a legal requirement to show
progress in the next four years (see United States section).
Waiting for Washington to take the climate seriously is a
counsel of despair. It also ignores the magnitude of states’ plans.
Pledges by states help set America on the path to a 17% cut in
emissions by 2025, using 2005 as a baseline. Add a few more andthe total would increase to nearly 25%, putting America within
striking distance of the (albeit modest) commitment the previ-
ous White House made in Paris in 2016, even though the federal
government has promised to withdraw from that agreement.
This matters for two reasons. First, because the world’s larg-
est economy is a significant source of pollution. America, like
every other country, needs to be on a path to eliminate all emis-
sions by mid-century or shortly thereafter if it is to reduce the
risks posed by climate change. Second, because the assumption
that America is a laggard gives other countries an excuse to do
nothing, undermining international climate diplomacy.
States like California with ambitious laws on emissions can
encourage the development of technologies that will then be
used by others. And if America can stay on track through state ac-
tions, the nationwide politics of climate change might just
change in the coming decades. Just over half of Americans aged
55 or over think climate change is man-made and worry about it,
according to polling by Gallup. Among Americans aged 18-34,
three-quarters do. America’s economy has been through trans-
formations before. It can go through another. 72