Tag: innovation

Pull Power from Pollution

Posted on by Alexandra Cogels
Coastline with industry, Spotlight Europe
Convert pollution into new energy. (Flickr: Kees de Voss/licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Never had a phone call made such an impact on her. It was like an electroshock. After a restless night, she still felt dizzy from the news she had heard. She pinched herself and smiled; « This is not a dream » she thought, « this is for real! ». She still hadn’t swallowed the fact that she, Helena Stavriokis, had won the Nobel Prize.

Helena felt uneasy as she climbed the stairs to her plane for Stockholm: a plane all to herself. Never had she been indulged in such a luxury; « Am I that important? » she wondered. She sat at the window of her plane, watching the clouds invade the view as the hum of the reactors was soothing her. She could picture herself five years ago, the 5th of May 2025, doubtful and uncertain at the launching of her project; an invention called « Pull Power from Pollution ». The PPP was a small-scale device that was placed on buildings to convert the CO2 sucked from the common air into energy.

“The PPP was definitely overshadowing all the other sustainable energy industries.”

The PPP was definitely overshadowing all the other sustainable energy industries. Beyond the fuss that was generated by this new competitor, they could all sleep on both ears as they knew that it wasn’t going to be a long lasting product. The use of the device would decline at the same rate as the pollution would. « In 50 years’ time, the PPP will eradicate any hint of pollution » had speculated a renowned German researcher.  Nobody was really concerned about the future disappearing of the PPP; new viable sources of energy would emerge as the competitiveness within Europe kept growing. Something more important stood out: pollution was not going to jeopardize the future of our children anymore.

With the smashing success of her invention after only five years’ time, she realized how silly it was of her for having been so doubtful at the beginning. Europe had reached, two years beforehand, the goals set for 2030: diminish by 40% the Green Gas Emission, and boost by 27% the Energy Efficiency and the Renewable Sources. Helena was lucid, she knew it wasn’t only by virtue of the PPP; Europe had made huge improvements on the energy field since the launching of the Energy Union in 2020. Eco-friendly energy technologies had developed massively and our dependence on mineral oil imports were steadily reduced. Energy became safer, more affordable and sustainable; Europe had become the world energy leader, Europe had become even more united!

“With the PPP, Greece had gained back its former recognition on the international level.”

The clamorous noise reminding her to fasten her belt shoved her out of her thoughts. The plane was landing in only twenty minutes. Helena glanced through the window and noticed the beauty of the city covered in snow. « This will change me from Greece » she told herself enthusiastically. But then, she felt a twinge of sadness thinking about her parents who had never witnessed a single snowfall. Her family got struck really hard by the crisis back in 2008, and as they put their daughter’s will to study before their own needs, they never got the chance to travel. The consequences of the crisis were such that after 6 years, Greece lost a quarter of its GDP. Greece was in debt to its ears and this situation started to build conflicts within Europe as nobody was willing to lend more money. It was dreadful to the point that, silently, Europe was struggling to know if it would end up with a”divorce”. But now, eleven and fifteen years after Helena’s parents’ death, things are different. The Energy Union had driven the creation of jobs across the continent and accordingly unemployment had lowered. Tourism in Greece has been strongly revaluated and the economy went inexorably, but slowly, on the rise. With the PPP, Greece had gained back its former recognition on the international level.

« The Nobel Prize of Physics for the invention that has enabled to transform pollution into energy goes out to Helena Stavrionikis ».  « Helena Stavrionikis », her name was resonating inside her head. There was a floating moment where no one moved, nothing happened. She was motionless. All the sacrifices that her parents had suffered from, that made it possible for her to be here, was the only thing she could think about. Helena couldn’t rely on the reassuring gaze of anyone in the audience: she had chosen sciences over the building of a family. Imagining the pride that her parents would have felt seeing her today gave her the strength to get up and receive the honors. How overjoyed they would have been to see a Europe that could rely on Greece, a unified Europe.

About the author:
Alexandra Cogels, Spotlight Europe
Alexandra – Author at Spotlight Europe

Alexandra (17) participated at our workshop in Brussels in February 2015. She is a student at the Collège Saint-Michel in Brussels, Belgium.

Unfinished Struggles

Posted on by Tomas Vanheste

I was touched when I recently read the memoires of Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgium socialist statesman and one of the founding fathers of the European Union. How beautiful to see the passion of the man who in the middle of the fifties headed the group that worked on the Treaty of Rome (1957), the treaty establishing the European Economic Community.

The negotiations between the founding countries were not always easy. Sometimes simple issues like duties on bananas seemed insurmountable obstacles.

‘When I ran out of arguments and patience, I declared that I gave the struggling parties two hours to come to an agreement,’ Spaak writes in his memoires. ‘Otherwise I would invite the press and tell them that it was impossible to build Europe because we could not solve the issue of bananas.’

They made it. When the Treaty was signed on the 25th of March 1957, ‘the clocks of Rome sounded at full strength, to greet the birth of the New Europe,’ Spaak wrote. In his eyes it marked ‘the triumph of the spirit of cooperation and the defeat of egoistic nationalism’.

I work for the Dutch online journalism platform De Correspondent. At De Correspondent we don’t believe in absolutely independent journalism. Of course we strive to be open-minded and not driven by ideology. But we choose to show the parti pris everyone has and that journalists normally feel obliged to hide. I fully confess that I have warm feelings for Spaaks ideals, for the attempt to overcome narrow nationalism and seek common understanding and cooperation on our war-torn continent.

Just like the European Union, De Correspondent is a project of collaboration. We believe the time in which the journalist told “the truth” to the reader and simply sent his message to him, is over. We want to take the readers with us on our journalistic adventure. Under our articles readers have the possibility not to react, but to contribute, and to mention their field of expertise. Often very interesting debates take place on our site. Readers share their ideas with us and give us suggestions for research we have to do and new articles we have to write.

De Correspondent is made possible by our members. We started a year ago after setting a world record in crowd funding for journalism. We proved that it is not true that people do not want to pay for journalism on the internet. Maybe not for news, but our goal is to not to provide news. We want to delve deeper and to write background articles on the reality behind the headlines. On our site we have no advertisements, to avoid flickering banners and give a comfortable reading experience, but also to make sure that advertisers don’t have any influence on what we write.

At the moment about thirty correspondents work for us, each with their own field of expertise. I myself am ‘Correspondent Europe between power and imigination’. As I said, I have strong feelings for the European idea. But that doesn’t make me an uncritical sympathiser of the European Union as it is. On the contrary. My research as a journalist shows that there is a lot wrong with the EU. Lobbies often have too much influence on the making of European laws. Although the European parliament has become more and more powerful, many Europeans do not feel they are represented by it. And the EU wants to be a ‘strong global actor’, but often the member states act on their own in foreign policy.

The memoires that Spaak published in 1969 have the tittle ‘Combats inachevés, Unfinished struggles. The part in which he writes about the EU is titled:  ‘de l’espoir au déceptions’, from hope to deception. In the last chapter Spaak writes about the crisis of 1965, when France stayed away from European meetings, protesting against the plans for a common agricultural policy.

Fifty years later we are maybe in an even deeper crisis. How to overcome the economic malaise we’re suffering from for years already?  How to regain believe in the Europaean project in times of rising euroscepsis? How to find an answer to the chaos and the violence near our borders and really become a strong global actor?

As ‘correspondent’ I want to find out how Europe tries to find answers to these difficult questions and to renew itself. Not only the European Union, De Correspondent is also an ‘unfinished struggle.’ Indeed, in both cases we have just begun.

About the author:

Tomas VanhesteTomas Vanheste is journalist with the innovative online media platform De Correspondent in the Netherlands. more…