Comment by ahupp
5 hours ago
> but no indication of what that means
The very first thing it means is that a firm has to understand the new law and then determine what changes it requires. And as a firm gets smaller that makes the relative burden higher. Of course this shouldn’t imply you never change anything, but it does mean every incremental new regulation is a ratchet that shifts in favor of large firms. The EU estimates this regulation avoids 23Mt of CO2[0], which is about 0.8% of EU emissions. Not sure that’s the place to focus unless you can make a case that it will have spillover effects into other markets.
[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-00218...
Realistically if you're a small company, you just do it, until someone tells you "hey you're supposed to comply with X" and then you say "oh sorry, we didn't realise, we'll do that now", repeat for all X. Programmers think the written law is a description of what actually happens - it's not.
The people effected by this are not programmers sitting around in their underwear talking to Claude all day and peddling virtual wares. It's people making real things with their hands, and they have come to the conclusion they can not take such a risk. Fines in countries like Germany can run up to 200 000 euros, for which you can be personally liable.
0.8% at the size of the EU economy is a huge win. It's slightly smaller than Denmark's fossil fuel emissions. Though, the savings are presumably calculated over several years while Denmark produces it every single year.
Almost a 1% win, just by changing packaging? That seems massive.
I have no skin in this game, but just because they're doing it doesn't mean it's their focus, the EU is big enough to work on multiple 0.8%-size wins all over the place.
0.8% actually sounds pretty good