Spain believes that the European Climate Law is "insufficient"



Spain considers that the proposal of the Climate Law presented by the European Commission (EC) is "positive" because it sets the year 2050 as a cap for decarbonization and contemplates aid for the coal regions, but "insufficient" because it lacks "concretion" and objectives Country by country and not just sets.

"It is positive that the Commission is serious about referring those workers, those regions that are affected by the transformation, through the Fair Transition Fund," said the Spanish Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, upon arrival. to a European Environment Council.

But "the measures they are presenting are insufficient, they lack specificity regarding what happens in the year 2030 and how the mechanisms are oriented so that the transition is credible and not just a reference to 2050 that is very distant," added the headline. Spanish.

Ribera believes that the text of the Community Executive presiding over Ursula von der Leyen "must be adjusted" in particular with regard to the Fair Transition Fund, a mechanism to expressly support regions especially affected in terms of employment by energy transformation.

In Spain, Asturias, León, Palencia, Coruña, Teruel, Cádiz, Córdoba and Almería would be eligible for these grants and, of the 7.5 billion euros that would be allocated over the next seven years, the Commission proposes to grant them 307.4 million; that is, 4% of the total.

The fund is more generous with other countries that also have regions where coal has a great tradition. Thus Poland, which has not yet supported the objective by 2050, and Germany, the most robust economy in the EU, would be the biggest beneficiaries, with some 2,000 million for Warsaw and 877 million for Berlin.

In that sense, Ribera asked for the "complete commitment to decarbonization" to "those who can benefit from that fund" and "to clearly take into account the unemployment levels and the transformations that are already under way carbon closure. "

The minister considered that there should be two "preconditions" to release those funds, a first based on respect for the rule of law "on all fronts", and a second linked to the "public and express commitment of the objective of that Just Transition Mechanism , which is decarbonization.

In general terms, Ribera regretted that the Von der Leyen European Climate Law proposal only sets climate neutrality as an obligation of the European Union as a whole and not "for each of the Member States so that no one intends to escape from that process ".

At the beginning of the ministerial debate, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was invited to participate, asking the EU to take as a reference more ambitious scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to try to reduce limiting the rise in temperatures to 1 , 5 degrees at the end of the century and demanded urgency in its application to guarantee "a safe future" to young people.

"It is not enough to set targets for 2030 and 2050, but it is also necessary to review those of 2020" because it is "the safest possible way to achieve these goals," said Thunberg, who received applause at the end of his speech and abandoned the room where the environment ministers of the Twenty-seven meet.

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