And Stanislav Petrov.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_So...

Politicians and managers like to think they’re in control, but mostly they’re not, the engineers (and other techies) are. Otherwise things wouldn’t work and accidents would happen far more often than they do. Just look at Belgium.

caw.ceu.edu/other-activi...

It’s just a hypothesis, but I suspect that the real world will overtake political targets due in part to the use of standards and the inherent desire of technical decision makers to make things better.

While politicians set high level targets, standards encourage and often require progress towards “better”. Maybe that progress isn’t fast enough, but it is made up of billions of technical decisions by those who apply standards, e.g. engineers, scientists and other experts (the techies).

… , albeit not in the public domain until drafts are published (DPCs, drafts for public comment).

This results in something between the cathedral and the bazaar of ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’, with the standards organisation (e.g. CEN) providing the management and the volunteers providing the “many eyeballs”…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat...

The standardisation process relies on volunteer technical experts, who tend to be either academics or industry representatives who know what they’re talking about, e.g. engineers for the manufacturing and construction sectors, scientists in others.

They also define industry best practice (sometimes they lead it), so carbon reduction is baked in at every level because it makes good technical and business sense for many reasons, and the standards organisations explicitly support the UN SDGs.

www.iso.org/sdg

Standards don’t lead to the setting of political targets but they do lead to the setting of organisational targets, ISO 14068-1 for example.

www.iso.org/standard/432...

If this didn’t happen, nothing would work for the end users.

And many CEN standards are initiated in support of EC directives, adopted by the BSI as UK standards (BS EN standards), so keeping the UK (and other CEN members that act similarly) aligned with the EU.

I agree that makes sense from a political perspective, but the reality on the ground is that the technical details are decided by CEN standards, so organisations are dragged into conformity whether they like it or not.

Excellent thread, thank you. For future figures, please can you use the CEN member countries rather than the EU27? This would better reflect Europe and the countries that adhere to European standards.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europea...

‘One night in the zoo’ by Judith Kerr. You can tweak your reading of it to pretty much any situation and it works for a wide age range.

www.booktrust.org.uk/book/o/one-n...