Environment Energy Mining Watch SEE|News|The EU and the Balkans are very far from the 2020 climate targets

The EU and the Balkans are very far from the 2020 climate targets

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The first scientific hypotheses about the impact of industry on the environment emerged in the 19th century when “greenhouse gases” were first identified and named. Even today, in some developed and extremely rich parts of the world, this hypothesis is being tried to be refuted (unsuccessfully), and it has caused controversy even in its beginnings. In the 1920s, Serbian physicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković derived a theory known today as the Milanković cycles, in which he explained how the Earth’s trajectory through space could affect the climate due to changes in the Earth’s oscillation and percession. The poor transfer of science and the pseudo-scientific opinions that have followed to this day allow opponents of the “theory” of climate change to point out that the climate change we live in today is a “natural phenomenon”.

Yet, during the first half of the 20th century, the impact of human activity on the climate became increasingly difficult to ignore and numerous scientists emerged with an awareness of the global consequences of these changes. By the 1980s, climate change was becoming a scientific fact. Only in this historical context can we learn the devastating information that testifies that the EU achieved its climate goal of reducing greenhouse gases by 20 percent by 2020 after the end of the Kyoto Protocol in 2013. So when the EU signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, there was no doubt that this goal for a powerful European Union was not really any ambitious plan. In fact, five years earlier it was clear that in this community of states there is no consensus on the need to accelerate the repair of damage to the Earth’s climate. If we add to this historical perspective the one we wrote about last week, which shows that EU countries (28) are historically the biggest global polluters, the superficiality with which the EU deals with climate change deserves at least political, if not judicial sanctions. To this should be added the political manipulation of the public perception of climate change. No matter how much it wants to, the EU is by no means able to impose the principle of climate protection on its entrepreneurs. Even when the climate goals for 2020 were discussed in the Union at the time of COP21, green parties and activists warned that this goal was devastating for the EU in terms of capital, resources, knowledge and technology that it possesses or can develop. Second, the EU has also compromised what is considered renewable energy sources: when not questioning the storage of non-recyclable solar panel waste, when ignoring the environmental cost of making wind turbines, or when compromising with poor members like Croatia and Bulgaria, they meet climate goals by burning biomass – thus identical to previous centuries.

EU targets have risen in recent years: first to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, then to 55 percent by 2030, and then to zero percent of emissions by 2050. At the same time, all serious steps have been compromised in the European Parliament that would achieve this ultimate goal of zero percent – ostensibly due to concessions to poor eastern members, but in fact it is a matter of concessions to domestic entrepreneurs. Because although it is ready to change the lifestyles of 800 million people in Europe, the Commission is not ready to change the conditions for financing European capital. Such an incredible fund set up last year, into which trillions of euros were to be poured to help tackle climate change, gapes more empty than full. The European Investment Bank has been renamed the European Climate Bank, but it is difficult to imagine the circumstances in which businessmen in peripheral countries receive investment development funds for infrastructure development and resource production for renewable energy plants. Capital is still extremely expensive on the periphery, and the EU has done nothing to bring any balance to the oppressive attitude of capital towards the eastern member states, except to allow us to heat ourselves on wood without remorse. And it imposed on us the LNG terminal in Omišalj on the island of Krk, which is a fist in the eye and a compromise with the USA. Regardless of announcements and wishes, the EU has still not imposed any capital restrictions on processes that harm the environment, just as it has not imposed customs duties on all environmentally harmful goods. At the same time, it refused to lift sanctions on Chinese solar panels, which are cheaper than European ones because they are publicly funded by China. The fact that solar panels produced in Germany are also publicly subsidized (by incentives paid by citizens directly through electricity bills – just like us) does not matter at the political level. Namely, German indirect subsidies are allowed, but not Chinese direct ones, because the latter is state protectionism, while the former is not. Why is not? Because the rules are set by the European Union and not China.

The mentioned IPCC really publishes more and more horrible reports on the state of land, sea, rivers, lakes, mammals, birds, vertebrates, insects, crops, and even human rights and the like. These and other scientific studies tell us about the saturation of forests that can no longer absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, about the amounts of microplastics that are already present in human, and even more often animal fetuses. They also witness halved populations of all living species, seas penetrated by freshwater and causing the death of species that die in severe pain. They testify to the albedo effects that will make it impossible for all the trees planted last year to actually have any real effect. These scientific papers tell us that the dissolution of permafrost that has been burning all summer brings the appearance of unknown new (e.g., SARS COV-19) and ancient viruses (e.g., bubonic plague). Do plants get even more saturated with CO2, and do they stop photosynthesis, close their leaves, what will we eat and what will we live on? Science tells us about dwindling amounts of fish in the sea, about an increasing number of extinct animals, about birds that fall frozen in flight because they have no energy to fly and defend against the cold due to lack of food.

The Paris Agreement was signed with this very goal: the remediation of climate change. It is a legally binding international agreement on climate change. It was adopted by 196 politicians and countries present at COP 21 in Paris on 12 December 2015 and entered into force on 4 November 2016. Its aim is to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, preferably 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to the pre-industrial level. Five years later, the Earth is warming to an average of 3 degrees Celsius – this means that despite all efforts, warming is not that it is not under control, but it is not slowed down. Had the coronavirus virus epidemic not hit the entire planet in 2020, the 7 percent global greenhouse gas reduction we are recording today would not have happened. All the more so are the “successes” that the EU boasts of. Scientists predominantly believe that the coronavirus pandemic is the result of climate change (rising temperatures, melting permafrost, etc.), so paradoxically, this year’s drop in emissions is not the result of climate change mitigation measures, but vice versa: an epidemic affecting humans is a measure of climate change.

According to official documents, the implementation of the Paris Agreement requires economic and social transformation, based on the best available science, which should lead increasingly ambitious climate actions in five-year cycles. By the end of 2020, countries were required to submit their climate action plans known as individual national contributions (NDCs). But remember, in earlier years these NDCs in the EU were so poorly made that all countries except Spain were punished. The concrete Croatian plan was really shameful. Instead of our potential, he was uncovering a corrupt state infrastructure filled with personnel who were not trained to make such important decisions. Our NDC was so poorly transcribed and even worse designed that it really cited research into natural gas exploitation across the Dinari and the Adriatic. In October 2020, the Croatian Parliament voluntarily withdrew from the possibility of revoking improperly executed geothermal energy concessions, which will fill newspaper columns this year when corruption related to these energy aspects begins to be revealed. The reaction of the public was again absent, as well as the reaction of the media reduced to PR of the ruling class, preoccupied with the numbers of the living, the dead and the sick.

Source: bilten.org

 

 

 

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