ABSTRACT
The European Commission is now at the heart of EU environmental policy making and enforcement. Not only does it have an exclusive right to propose new environmental policy, but it also has a treaty-based responsibility to ensure the implementation of environmental rules. But this was not always the case. As outlined in Chapter 2, environmental policy started as a collection of disparate rules which had no treaty basis. There was no department dedicated to environmental issues for the first 15 years of the European Commission’s existence. It was only in 1973 that an environmental unit was created within Directorate General (DG) for Industry; a fully-fledged Environment DG was only set up in 1981.
