Sonja van Renssen, leading environment and climate journalist at viEUws.eu, is joined by Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard for an exclusive interview on the interaction between competitiveness and the 2030 Energy and Climate Framework. Hedegaard explains why climate policy should not be blamed for de-industrialisation and hampering competitiveness. “Energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors, were among the sectors that created more jobs during the crisis”, argues Hedegaard.
2030 Climate and Energy Framework will foster innovation, claims Climate Commissioner Hedegaard appeared first on viEUws.
Karel Beckman says
(Comment from Matthew Stepp of the Breakthrough Institute, sent via Karel Beckman, published here with permission): This is something I’ve done a lot of work in and it’s clear that a carbon price can spur incremental innovation, if structured correctly, but it won’t spur bigger breakthroughs. I’d argue we need more of the latter. This is borne out in the EU where the very small carbon price has allowed industry to pick some low-hanging fruit (energy efficiency mostly), but it’s certainly not driving investment in truly innovative technologies. The history of technology development has shown that public investment and well-structured public-private partnerships is the key to gaining these innovations, not some magical price on carbon.
ITIF released a report a couple of years ago on this and I plan on updating it sometime during the second half of the year. See http://www.itif.org/files/2011-inducing-innovation.pdf
Jeffrey Michel says
Ms. Hedegaard notes that some countries have taxed energy instead of labor. Germany took this course several years ago, but the public is now criticizing the added charges on everyone’s electricity bills for a) these taxes and b) the renewable energy EEG feed-in payments that they have helped make possible. These developments would nevertheless be tolerable if other countries were now following Germany’s Energiewende lead, but the majority of EU Member States do not yet seem prepared for such a radical transition. Germany itself remains unwilling to reduce its dependency on lignite, which presently costs (per GJ thermal energy) only about a third as much as natural gas in the United States, or a sixth of imported natural gas in Europe. Even after relative power plant efficiencies are factored in, lignite remains the winner. Carbon taxes can hardly gain traction in Germany considering the negative effects that increased EEG burden sharing will be having on the international competitiveness of certain industrial sectors. EU reindustrialization policies have become less plausible under these circumstances. It has likewise become dubious to justify future carbon taxation for the purpose of mitigating climate change, because the necessary initiatives were neglected decades ago that could have had a measurable effect on global CO2 emissions. Instead, Germany will be building up to 17 new coal and lignite plants between 2012 and 2020, all without CCS, and all without implementing the scope of transitional innovation that would be required to make them superfluous. China alone now uses nearly half the coal worldwide, while Europeans buy Chinese products with no thought given to their carbon-intensive manufacture. On the basis of current global trends, it will be impossible to limit global warming to 2 degrees Centigrade. Not a cent more should therefore be spent by the European Commission to support any such premise. Speaking in Berlin in October 2012, EU energy commissioner Günther Oettinger affirmed that it no longer made sense to go to Greenland to pet the polar bears. Chinese companies are instead securing mining rights there. They cannot be expected to support policies that would prevent glacial melting, which would permit even greater exploitation of mineral resources in the Arctic.