The Green Deal covers areas such as energy, construction, agriculture and transport, and further develops the concept of the ‘circular economy’ as well as the EU’s biodiversity strategy. The details of how existing policies will have to be adapted and new ones introduced will be worked out over 2020 and 2021.
However, the plan as currently constituted is not enough. The Green Deal remains ‘a new growth strategy’, based on the same ideology that led us into the climate crisis. Although the aim is to reduce the carbon-intensity of our lifestyle, it is continuing the path of further growth. It allows continuous extraction and consumption of unsustainable and non-renewable resources, with natural gas—specifically the less carbon-intensive liquefied natural gas—as an important part of the energy strategy for an (indefinite) transition period, including carbon-capture and storage (which is a long-term strategy by default). [...]
The speed and intensity with which we act is decisive: the more moderately we act, the more effort will be needed to try to contain global warming to an average 1.5C—if that’s still possible. Climate NGOs further stress that the EU should choose strategies that avoid a temporary overshoot of the 1.5-degree objective and which consequently also rely least on unproven removal technologies (including carbon capture and storage) to bring the temperature rise back below 1.5C in case of overshoot. They are not the only experts judging that the development and deployment of sustainable negative emission technologies at a global scale is unreliable today. [...]
What we need instead is a revolution in our lifestyles. We need a radically different way of thinking. We need to tap into existing movements and forms of organisation that have a ‘healthy eco-system-first’ strategy and apply indicators that do not reflect quantitative production capacity (gross domestic product) but the improvement of our (qualitative) wellbeing. Without this change, we cannot reach net-zero emissions and we cannot contain global warming to 1.5 degrees.
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