There is a story about a North Dakota coal-fired power plant, in the United States, which tells better than many conferences why the ecological transition, on whose urgency we all agree in words, is so difficult to implement.
The central is called Coal Creek Station and in 2019 it lost $ 190 million, given the success of other energy sources, such as gas and renewables. Its fate was sealed: in 2022 it will close, it was decided. The plant would be put up for sale for a dollar and North Dakota would have produced energy by exploiting the mighty winds that flow through it (which it already does). But it did not go like this: before local politicians have blocked the authorization for renewable energy plants and then a contractor stepped forward to take over the plant and promised to bury the carbon emissions. End of the story.
Which goes in the same direction as the over 1000 projects of renewable energy plants presented in Italy and stop at the pole; and the letter that the director of the largest fund manager, Blackrock, sent to shareholders basically saying: who said that we should withdraw our investments from oil companies? We will not.
Let’s be clear, because the ecological transition, like every revolution, is not a gala dinner: they are there jobs lost in one sector and created in another, they are there companies traditional ones that go into crisis and others, new ones, that grow; there are technologies consolidated to be scrapped and others, experimental, to be tested. These are processes that need to be managed. Knowing that there is not something abstract at stake, but the near future of the planet. Indeed, the present.
And instead the impression is that we are all environmentalists in November, when the Cops are around which bring together all the countries of the world to talk about climate, but then in January we forget it until the next COP, when we will make other amazing promises. OR another “blah, blah, blah”, as some would say.
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