EU is the world’s largest net energy importer and consumer, so why do its Members continue to negotiate individually with the rest of the world rather than as one big market with a big voice?

The EU is currently developing a Maritime Security Strategy. Space should be integrated in that effort, given its potential for maritime surveillance.

Summing up Europe’s climate policies suggests we still haven’t grasped the full potential for energy savings. We act as if we were living in a system with infinite resources easily exploited by human innovation and ingenuity. We focus on the efficiencies we can gain from components of our system, but not on the system as a whole and we do not consider how the other billions of people on earth can achieve our level of comfort with a resource or carbon-constrained future and with aspirations that necessarily imply sharply growing energy consumption.

Marie C. DONNELLY, DG Energy, reported that the EU is “unlikely to achieve a 20% reduction on the current set of policies” [1] by 2020. According to her, based on a modelling exercise, the estimate of energy savings “would be somewhere between 9 and 11% on current policies” in spite of the contribution of the economic crisis to decreasing the EU primary energy consumption.

Galileo is one of the most ambitious programs ever managed by the EU. As such, it illustrates the challenges and the opportunities offered by the development of a European Space Policy at the political, industrial, economic and international level.