The transition from coal to renewable energy is gaining pace throughout Europe. In 2015, the United Kingdom was the first country in the world to announce an explicit end to burning coal for energy production. Since then, an additional 14 EU member countries have announced that they will phase out electricity generation from coal—and a few, including Finland, France and the Netherlands, have enshrined this in law. While its end date of 2035-38 remains inadequate, Germany will also legislate a coal phase-out early this year. [...]
1. Ambition is key: we cannot address climate change or the extremely heavy cost of its impacts without a rapid phase-out of coal. The ambition of announced phase-out dates and pathways must be judged against the backdrop of the scientific findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and national coal dependence. No matter how attached they are to coal, all European countries must be coal-free by 2030 if we are to keep the temperature rise below 1.5C. While this demands major changes in infrastructure, policies and finance, a decade is more than enough time to make it happen. [...]
5. Gas and biomass are not bridges: the climate benefits of gas and bioenergy are not what they promise—natural gas is still a climate-damaging fossil fuel, which leaks methane, and biomass life-cycle emissions are far from zero. Due to the high Dutch renewables target, no new fossil-gas plants will need to be built there, and the use of existing gas plants will likely reduce by 2030. [...]
The Finnish experience shows that polluters cannot count on compensation. In a significant ruling, its Constitutional Law Committee decided that companies and other traders could not reasonably expect the legislation governing their business to remain unchanged. Furthermore, it ruled that ‘responsibility for the environment’ overrode commercial claims brought forward by the energy companies.
No comments:
Post a Comment