Climate Neutrality and Democratic Ownership after COVID

On 21 October, the Copenhagen-based Democracy in Europe Organisation (DEO), along with the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Brussels Office, hosted a forum on the challenges of a socially just transition to clean energy, with former Copenhagen City councillor Ulrik Kohl. Kohl, a researcher on community energy in the Nordic countries and Southeast Europe with Malmö University and Roskilde University, spoke about the role of the left and communities in organising grassroots, working class alternatives to the capitalist Green Deal.

The idea of a ‘Green Deal’, or ‘Green New Deal’, has increasingly been seen as a panacea for the unfolding climate crisis. Since the outbreak of the Covid-19, it has also been presented as a solution to the global health and economic crises unfolding in the wake of the pandemic. In Europe, the call for an ‘EU Green Deal’ emerged in 2019, centring around a target of European Union carbon neutrality by 2050. This year EU leaders made this a binding target, setting a further preliminary greenhouse gas emissions reduction target of at least 55% by 2030 (compared to 1990 levels).

Such a rapid transition to green energy and climate neutrality is an urgent necessity, but while welcome, the promised reductions have also been criticised as inadequate. Worse yet, they are unlikely to be met. The reliance on market mechanisms and emissions trading has proved worse than useless, cuts foreshadowed in 2015’s Paris Agreement have simply not eventuated, and without a major change in approach, the latest pledges by world governments at the COP26 summit in Glasgow are likely to go the same way.

Read the full article at Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung - Brussels Office.

Germany announces the phase-out of nuclear power

On May 30, the German government announced that all of Germany’s seventeen nuclear power stations would be permanently shut down by 2022.

Germany’s seven oldest nuclear power stations – temporarily switched off after public outcry and protests in the aftermath of the disaster in Fukushima – will remain offline, and will be permanently decommissioned.

An eighth plant – in northern Germany – is already offline because of technical problems, and will remain shut down for good.Six of the remaining 9 power stations will be shut down in 2021, and the final three will be turned off in 2022.

"It's definite: the latest end of the last three nuclear power plants is 2022," Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen told reporters. "There will be no clause for revision."

The announcement has been greeted with critical support from anti-nuclear and environmental organisations such as Greenpeace, who have maintained their call for an earlier phase out date of 2015.

The announcement is not an entirely new proposition, either. In 2001, the then coalition government of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the German Greens passed legislation to phase out nuclear power in Germany by the end of 2021.