CEE must go green, but lacks the urge
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CEE must go green, but lacks the urge

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Building a sustainable energy system is crucial for central and eastern Europe. But bad past experiences and political scepticism may make implementing COP 21 tough

Greening the economy will be a key challenge for central and eastern Europe in the next few years. Whether the effort can win enough political support is in doubt.

“The biggest stumbling block is there is no faith in the region that renewables can work,” said Sabrina Schulz, head of the Berlin office at E3G, an environmental thinktank. “That makes it so difficult to arrange any political strategy around a real objective.”

The European Union signed up to the COP 21 agreement in Paris in December, committing to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40% below 1990 levels, by 2030. But each country has still to ratify it, and work out how to share the burden among member states.

“The current EU policy seems to be: let’s make sure we get done with everything on the political agenda of this year and talk about Paris later,” said Schulz.

The EU has directives on renewable energy and energy efficiency to get through the legislative process now, and COP 21 may have to wait. “Everyone is afraid Poland will derail things,” Schulz said.

The most populous country in the eastern part of the EU obtained 81% of its electricity from coal in 2014, though wind and solar had grown to 6.5%.

Ratifying COP 21 and concluding the effort-sharing negotiations could take two years, observers reckon.

This slow process could hinder Europe from making the “at least” wording attached to its 40% commitment a reality. Scientists agree that the COP 21 commitments are far from enough to save the world from catastrophic climate change, and are better seen as a first step.

“There is a lot of data that we are going to beat our target for the 2020s easily,” said Nikki Bartlett, senior programme manager at the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group at Cambridge University. “So the question is, could the 2030 commitment be stronger? There is going to be a push from many parts of civil society and business quarters that Europe could increase its ambition. At the same time, we will be going through the effort-sharing negotiations, so people are not going to want to open that can of worms, and that could be tricky with the politics of eastern Europe.”

GETTING IT WRONG

Right wing Euroscepticism in countries such as Hungary will make it harder for them to implement any EU-led policy on the climate.

Some have been put off renewable energy. “Many countries have a track record of getting it wrong,” Schulz said. “In the Czech Republic they tried a feed-in tariff, but it was set too high. Some people benefited but consumers are now stuck with high electricity prices without a substantial change in the energy mix.”

Plants in eastern Europe tend to be less energy-efficient than those further west, which means there are some low-hanging fruit in the energy transition.

But the structure of the energy industry also makes progress harder. “It’s an entirely different market, because there are very big, state-owned energy companies,” said Bartlett. “It is potentially harder for eastern Europe, because there needs to be a new type of market dynamics, which requires a different policy environment.”



 

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