The war in Ukraine has brought not only slaughter and atrocities, but an opportunity for further reflection on the need for the EU to attain energy self-sufficiency. In last month’s Newsletter we wrote about the REPowerEU initiative hurriedly launched by the European Commission. But let’s look at what the Green New Deal for Europe was saying as long ago as September 2019:
“The Green New Deal for Europe will replace all fossil fuel infrastructure, while ensuring that workers whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuel industries can enjoy an even higher standard of living in the future than today. This does not mean immediately banning all fossil fuels. It means reorganising our economy around sustainable technologies and green energy so that fossil fuels become unnecessary. The one exception is fracking, which we propose to ban immediately. Fracking releases a significant amount of methane into the atmosphere and has proven to be highly damaging to the environment.”
“The GNDE will transition Europe toward 100% renewable energy. In order to ensure that this transition does not hurt regions that depend heavily on nuclear to supply both jobs and cheap energy, the GNDE provides powerful incentives to national and regional authorities to initiate green projects that can transition ensure that nuclear jobs are replaced, one by one, by green jobs. The GNDE therefore does not ban nuclear energy in Europe, but rather sets the stage for its obsolescence.”
It has taken a terrible conflict and enormous human suffering to turn ideas that were initially dismissed as “utopian” into “the logical answer”. https://gnde.diem25.org/faq
Gruppo Suolo Europa 