European Union officials once again proved themselves to be the standard-bearers for free-market capitalism by making a series of concessions to the continent’s heavy industries in the latest series of international climate change negotiations in Poznan, Poland. These industries will now only have to pay for 70% of their climate ‘credits’ on the already-flawed EU Carbon Trading Scheme, while hospitals and universities remain paying the full charge. The talks, which are designed to iron out the differences between the various national capitalist interests ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit in late 2009, have been littered with obstructions that are exclusively based around state sovereignty (such as Brazil’s reluctance to allow isolation of the Amazon akin to that of Antarctica) or corporate interests from the oil, coal, aviation and automobile industries.