The Economist June 11th 2022 Europe 55Charge!
W
hat has the European Union ever done for us? Well, the sin
gle market is jolly useful, as anyone running a business can
attest. Structural funds have financed roads, electricity grids and
whatnot in poorer bits of the continent. Rather urgent plans to
achieve net zero carbon emissions within a generation have been
hashed out at eulevel, lest anyone forget. You can cross most of its
borders without a passport, too, though people take them on holi
day anyway. Not to mention antitrust rules devised then enforced
in Brussels to prevent big firms from bilking consumers. Oh and
there is peace, at least within the bloc.
Charlemagne could go on. The problem is, few Europeans
know about much of this, or give the eucredit for it. Most of what
affects their daily lives—education, tax rates, housing benefits,
fixing potholes—is decided by national governments or local
ones. Beyond the odd summit of leaders discussing the fate of the
world (or at least the euro) much of what happens in Brussels is
noted primarily by policy wonks. Only occasionally does the great
hulking regulatory machine there, including a 32,000strong
European Commission and 705 meps, find a way of doing some
thing that will be both noticed by citizens and for which the eucan
claim credit. One such example was agreed on June 7th: by 2024
makers of devices including smartphones and cameras will have
to switch to a single type of charger mandated by Brussels.
European plans for a common plug for electronics are nearly as
old as the gizmos themselves. The idea was already floating
around in 2006, before the iPhone came to market. Since then ev
ery nerd from Lisbon to Helsinki has squirreled away a box full of
tangled wire, kept just in case a 12yearold Nokia brick might need
to be revived. The avoidance of such electronic waste is one puta
tive motive for imposing a common charger. The model selected is
known as usb-c, an industry standard which most manufacturers
already use. The big exception is Apple, which has stuck to its own
system. It will either have to make Europeonly gadgets with a usb
slot (which many Apple tablets and laptops already feature) or
switch over all its iPhones globally to suit the edict.
This electronicwaste line of reasoning is itself as antiquated
as a flipphone. Handset chargers used to be fistsized bundles of
metal; now they are mere cables that connect to interchangeable
plugslots.Mostpeople already have plenty of them. A mooted cut
of 1,000 tonnes of binned electronics avoided per year sounds im
pressive, but represents about 0.002% of the global figure. Anoth
er justification put forward is the carbon footprint of chargers.
Taken together, all those produced for Europeans every year will
generate lifecycle emissions of around 900,000 tonnes of CO 2
equivalent. Yet that is less than is spewed by a single Boeing jet.
Expected consumer savings of €250m ($267m) a year mean each
eu citizen can look forward to a bonanza of roughly €1 every two
years, not much of a dent in the costofliving squeeze.
The final argument is one of convenience, for firms and con
sumers alike. Politicians used to hesitate before telling companies
and people what was good for them, even in Europe. But the euis
in a dirigistemood these days (the official leading the charge on
chargers, Thierry Breton, is the French internalmarket commis
sioner). Companies stand accused of having failed to gauge the
impact of their actions: all that outsourcing to China, say, might
prove one day to be as harmful as dependence on Russian gas is to
day. Public money is pouring into investments, from microchips
to semiconductors, which the private sector is apparently too
shortsighted to back without subsidy. Spelling out to companies
that designed the phones (and chargers that keep them lit) how
best to do that fits that politiciansknowbest mould. Needling
American tech behemoths is an added bonus.
The downside of regulation seems to have been ignored. Stan
dardising chargers might make sense if they have reached the end
state of their development, like electric plugs. But have they?
Phone cables have evolved markedly within recent memory, for
example when it comes to downloading data as well as juice. Now
what innovation might come will have to be agreed by a technical
committee that signs off on the usbstandard. Apple has taken out
patents on a plugin charger that would improve the waterresis
tance of its devices: it may as well bin them now, at least in Europe.
A similar onesizefitsall approach will in time be applied to
wireless charging, the next big thing in keeping your smartphone
alive beyond 3pm. Whoever invents the best system will have to
convince officialdom, not consumers, that it is indeed better. Battery low: connect your device
The balance between innovation and purported convenience is
incidental here. What matters is that however people feel about
the move, they are at least bound to notice it. In so far as Euro
peans hear about what Brussels has done for them, it is mostly
when they cross borders. The capping of mobilephone roaming
charges agreed over a decade ago is still brought up as one of the
bloc’s signature achievements (and a painful drawback for Brits as
they get clobbered with enormous bills for streaming Netflix to
while away the hours spent in noneuqueues at Tenerife airport).
Like passportfree travel or Erasmus university exchanges, this
only affects people who travel. But an eusurvey commissioned to
justify the end of roaming charges found that most Europeans sel
dom did, and over a third had never left their own country. In con
trast just about everyone has an electronic device these days.
Can Eurocrats be blamed for craving a bit of the spotlight their
national counterparts enjoy? The phonecharger rule provoked
more headlines than decades of sensible proposals on regulating
chemicals or life insurance ever have, and for which Brussels de
serves more credit than it gets. Mandating howphones are juiced
is a case of the eugetting closer to the daily concernsof citizens—
but also further from where it can be most useful.nCharlemagne
The eu’s push to impose a standard phone charger is a misguided cry for attention