After years of dispute over the classification of fossil gas and nuclear energy in the EU taxonomy, the European Commission’s draft delegate law will finally be published next week, which will determine whether they are considered a sustainable investment.
But this Thursday (December 16), one last big battle takes place in Brussels. The 27 heads of state and government of the EU will have one last word at the last European Council of the year on whether fossil gas and nuclear power should be included in the EU list of environmentally friendly economic sectors.
The battle lines have been drawn: on the one hand, France supports nuclear energy with Poland, the Czech Republic and other Eastern partners, most of whom are in favor of including fossil gas in the EU’s green label; on the other hand Italy, Spain, Denmark, Austria and Luxembourg, who are clearly opposed to viewing any of them as a sustainable investment.
Paradoxically, Central and Eastern European governments have been very vocal about including fossil gas on the EU’s green investment list when they are most at stake in terms of climate, energy prices and energy sovereignty.
Unmask the gas fairy tale
The love affair of Eastern Europe with the climate-damaging fossil gas lies in the fable that it can help them to break with an even more toxic relationship, that with coal.
If you look at the entire gas supply chain, including methane emissions, the impact of which on climate change is 84 times greater than that of CO2, generating electricity with gas can be even worse for the climate than with coal.
For this reason, the inclusion of gas electricity would seriously undermine the ability of the EU sustainable taxonomy to act as an independent and scientifically designed tool to guide investment in green activities. Accordingly, the IEA net zero by 2050 path emphasizes that there is absolutely no remaining CO2 budget for new gas investments and that existing gas-fired power plants in the OECD must be dismantled by 2035 and worldwide by 2040.
The Paris Agreement Compatible Scenario created by EEB and CAN Europe shows that an immediate leap from coal to renewable electricity generation without fossil gas and nuclear power is technically feasible. Now that gas prices are reaching record highs and the cost of all energy is skyrocketing, it is time to turn to solar and wind power, which are cheaper to generate than coal and fossil gas.
This energy model also proves that through the rapid mobilization of energy-saving potential, an accelerated, far-reaching renovation of buildings and modernization of industrial production processes, a greater use of circular economy solutions and a rapid ramp-up of domestic renewable energy with smart grids and battery storage.
As long as fossil gas remains part of the energy mix of Central and Eastern European countries, their citizens will continue to suffer electricity price shocks due to global speculation, volatility and geopolitical factors (more than 40 percent of the EU’s gas imports come from Russia). . Despite this well-known energy context, some heads of state and government in the eastern EU are trying to exploit the current energy price crisis to demand more fossil gas and fewer climate protection measures. The taxonomy should not be a vehicle for this.
Nuclear gambling “harms”
The potential contribution of nuclear power to reducing greenhouse gas emissions is as clear as its unsustainable nature due to serious safety risks, pollution, enormous investment of time and the unsolved waste problem.
Several inherent risks in nuclear energy, from disaster potential to waste management over hundreds of thousands of years to uranium mining, were not adequately addressed in the widely criticized Joint Research Center report, commissioned by the European Commission to support a decision on EU taxonomy. It seems obvious that the current nuclear technology cannot guarantee the EU principle “Do no significant harm”.
Investing in new nuclear power plants is not economically viable. New capacities are not realistic due to high investments, competition from renewables and time expenditure.
For example, the Catalan government estimates that with the same € 19 billion budget that was used to build the new Flamanville 3 nuclear reactor in France, it could invest in photovoltaic solar energy, which generates around five times more electricity and in a quarter of the time .
Labeling nuclear and fossil gas with the label of sustainability would undermine the EU’s climate goals, redirect urgently needed green investments in Central and Eastern Europe and jeopardize the credibility of the entire European Green Deal.
The EU taxonomy aims to provide companies, investors and policy-makers with clarity about which activities can be considered sustainable, prevent greenwashing and help move investments to where they are most needed.
Weak European rules for sustainable finance would particularly affect economies that are lagging behind in the transition to climate neutrality. The EU taxonomy is therefore one of the most important political instruments to work properly in the middle and east of the bloc and to enable a post-fossil energy transition.
Comments are closed.