Green Deal, EU focuses on best technologies

The Green Deal promoted a far-reaching change necessary to address two epochal challenges: the climate challenge requiring the fastest possible decarbonisation, and the natural resource scarcity challenge requiring a more circular economy and a more active preservation of natural capital. Global warming is causing damage, including economic damage, on a massive scale. The costs for mitigation and adaptation are significant, although far lower than those we will have to bear for delayed measures.

With a world population of 8 billion and globalised development, the consumption of materials has grown eightfold in the last 70 years to a staggering 106 billion tonnes. Strategic materials for development have become critical due to scarcity and/or geopolitical supply difficulties. The degradation of natural capital is no longer just an environmental problem, but a danger to food security, quality of life and development.

Facing these challenges - in the difficult context of the Covid pandemic and Russia's war against Ukraine - the European Union with the Green Deal has cut greenhouse gas emissions by 31% in 2023 compared to 1990 and by 5% compared to the previous year, in line with the ambitious 55% cut to 2030. A significant achievement, given that the EU is among the world's fastest warming areas: where extreme rainfall is increasing in intensity and frequency causing catastrophic flooding, with long periods of extreme heat. And given that it has global responsibilities not only because of the weight of its current and historical emissions accumulated in the atmosphere, but because, if it did not do its part, the already difficult and overdue global climate effort would be permanently undermined.

In the context of the Green Deal, several measures have been taken to improve the circularity of the economy, putting us on track to increase resource productivity, to achieve high rates of waste recycling and to increase the rate of circular use of materials: essential factors not only for climate and ecological sustainability, but for the resilience and competitiveness of the European economy. These challenges have also generated new opportunities, such as the boom in renewables, especially photovoltaics and wind power, which are expected to triple globally by 2030.

The plummeting costs of these plants, which are easy to produce and install, the integration between these two sources, complemented by available storage systems and other renewables such as hydroelectric, geothermal and biomass, make available huge amounts of electricity, safe, low-cost, generated, with new employment, by our territories and not imported. We should seize this opportunity, involving the regions more, binding them, if necessary, to reach decarbonisation targets for their electricity consumption, recognising bonuses when they exceed them. The environmental impacts of photovoltaics and wind power should be wisely assessed, taking into account their environmental and climate benefits and the worse impacts of all available alternatives. Just as anti-wind power demagogy should not be indulged. Landscapes, as well as their visual, cultural and variable perception, are constantly changing, not only due to the spread of buildings, roads and pylons, but also, for example, of the more ecological railways. The energy transition, based on distributed generation from renewable sources, has 'its own landscape': the impact on existing landscapes can be well managed and mitigated, but it is there, unless the energy transition fails.