Seen today on the Figaro website ( a leading French daily ) and on Reuters website.
The European Union Commission is meeting today and their topic is energy policy. Climate change is a major subject when it comes to energy and the EU commission clearly understand that.
As a matter of fact, they propose to decrease by 20 percent their emission by 2020 compared to the 1990 levels. They also proposed to cut these emissions by 30 percent if they were to be followed by other countries, including the United States.
The additional advantages of such a policy would be a decrease in the external energy dependency and an improved competitiveness of the concerned economies.
There are currently discussions on the importance nuclear power should have in this plan. But to me, nuclear is as important to achieve this ambitious goal as renewables and energy performance are.
So, shutting down reactors as Germany plans will increase in an important way the difficulty to reach these objectives. In fact, doing without nuclear will prove to be impossible as renewables and strong energy performance won’t be able to eradicate the risk of global climate change alone.
The talks mention as well biofuels, energy performance ( ie. using less energy to do more ) and the electricity connexions between countries…
I sincerely hope that this meeting will lead to concrete measures and actions. Climate change is now an important topic of discussion, but our future do not require solely discussions, but mainly on drastic actions.