Germany and Italy are the biggest climate laggards in Europe, study finds
Germany and Italy are the biggest climate laggards in Europe, study finds
Germany and Italy could be forced to spend an upwards of €15 billion on carbon credits to comply with an EU law.
Wissing to be honest. The transport sector is the only one to miss the target badly. Funnily enough 15billion€ is about as much as is currently missing to fix up the German railway network. As in fix it, not expand it.
Thats so surprising. Merkel doing absolutely nothing for 16 years did not just fuck up digitization, infrastructure, healthcare, schools but also the climate? Who could have guessed.
This is using the German projection reports from the UBA, which is a ministry run by the Greens. Those tend to be overly negative. Last years report projected a rise of German emissions by a few percent, what happened was a drop of 10%. This year they again project rising emissions, but the Q1 data shows a 6.6% drop in emissions, with Q2 electricity data also looking rather decent. Even so the report finds most sectors will be within emission limits. The only ones with problems are buidling, which is mainly heating, and transport. The building sector is projected to be slighly over the emission targets, with some rather important laws having been passed last year, which according to the report close the gap to 96Mt to 32Mt until 2030. Transport is doing much worse however. The gap is massive at 180Mt until 2030 and most laws, which would have a large impact being blocked. To be fair the gap is smaller then the projection from last year at 210Mt.
Point is, that this is pessimistic. However climate change is a massive issue and obviously doing more to cut emissions is the right thing to do.
The take from the title that Germany and Italy tops the statistic for Europe is still (partly) true. UK is still slightly worse than Italy.
By capita it's Luxembourg, Estonia and Iceland, but only due to low population. Their totals are pretty far down the lists.
WTF are you talking about? This is about the Effort Sharing Regulation(ESR), which requires EU members to lower emissions compared to 2005 depending on how rich they are(richer countries need to do more). The UK is therefore not part of this at all, as it is no longer an EU member. Neither is Iceland btw.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The European Union is at risk of missing its ambitious climate goals for 2030, and Germany and Italy are largely to blame.
There's just one problem: Germany and Italy could eat up the majority of credits available across the EU, setting up a costly bidding war by other countries that also miss their climate goals.
"Germany and Italy are eating up all available carbon credits from their neighbours, leaving them stranded and at risk of legal proceedings," Sofie Defour, climate director at T&E, said in a statement.
An EU climate law, known as the Effort Sharing Regulation, sets binding emissions reduction targets for each of the bloc's 27 countries.
Attempts by countries including Germany, Italy, and France to slash emissions from agriculture and transportation have sparked protests by farmers and citizens worried they will push up the costs and make EU products more expensive than imports.
Defour said countries face a choice: pay billions to their neighbors for their carbon debt or implement stronger climate policies, such as insulating houses to make them more energy efficient.
The original article contains 355 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 50%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Well of course. Germany has been opening coal plants in favor of nuclear plants.
No. Coal in general is in decline in Germany despite the shutdown of nuclear power plants. Some coal power plants were reactivated in 2022 to cover the shortage of gas, but at the same time the run time of the remaining nuclear power plants was extended by around 3 months. The reactivated coal power plants were shut down around the same time as the nuclear power plants.
This is what I meant. But I did not know the details.
That's not true at all. We've not burned as little coal as today since 1959.
While that's true, the article says
The two countries are so far off track of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in industries like transportation and buildings
Bullshit. The usage of coal in Germany is going steadily down and all German coal power plants will be phased out until 2035.
Fuck off with your nukehead propaganda