Natural Gas Treated as "Clean Energy" by the European Union, LREM and the Former President of WWF France
- Published on 07 October 2020
Natural Gas Treated as "Clean Energy" by the European Union, LREM[1] and the Former President of WWF France
Supported by the German presidency of Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, the European Parliament has just voted to establish a “Just Transition Fund (*)" endowed with 10 billion euros. This fund will provide funding for programs using natural gas, as if this source of energy were "clean" considering global warming.
Its goal is to encourage Member States that use coal on a massive scale to produce electricity, to switch to energies presented as cleaner, while at the same time lightening the social burden of this conversion by financing the conversion of coal workers to other trades.
The French government had initially opposed the inclusion of gas projects in this fund but, in the end, the LREM elected members of the European Parliament voted in favor of its creation. Among them was Pascal Canfin, Chairman of the European Parliament's Environment Committee and former President of WWF France.
The same Pascal Canfin is also campaigning to increase the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 55% instead of 40% by 2030. Unstoppable logic!!
For Europe helping Poland shut down old and highly polluting coal-fired power plants is understandable, if pragmatism is put forward to fight global warming. But will it be also necessary to help the Germans phase-out their coal- and lignite-fired plants? While they are preparing to permanently shut down, at the end of 2022, their last 9 nuclear power plants, which do not emit CO2? When they have just commissioned a brand-new coal-fired power plant?
How can we understand that gas is considered as "clean energy", and therefore can benefit from European funds, when a gas-fired power plant emits about 400 grams of CO2 per electric kWh? How can we understand that the same Pascal Canfin opposes the classification of nuclear power plants as clean energy and is opposed to all measures in their favor at the European level? Yet they are by far the most efficient power plants, as far as climate is concerned: the French power plants emit only 6 grams of CO2 per kWh, according to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which cannot be suspected of being biased. And they do not generate air pollution.
Should the word "logical" be deleted in the word ecological to the benefit of eco-ideological!
(*): JUST! Was it necessary to depreciate this word in order to satisfy purely political goals?
[1] LREM - La République En Marche i.e. The Republic On the Move, the party founded in April 2016 by the now French President, Emmanuel Macron.