«The EU expert group has only re-established a few simple facts: gas is not ecologically sustainable. It may have a role in the exit from coal but it has no citizenship among renewable energies. If governments followed the indications of the draft law, the objectives of the green deal and the Paris treaty would both be unattainable ”. Luca Bonaccorsi, director of Sustainable Finance of Transport & Environment and one of the Italian co-authors of the technical report of the Platform on sustainable finance on the draft delegated act of the EU Commission on the taxonomy of gas and nuclear, thus explains the “recommendations” that substantially reject the text prepared by Brussels.
“This draft is also the greatest incentive in history for the production of biogas” says Bonaccorsi, who has a past as an investment banker but also as a producer of radio and television programs on sustainable development. “To replace coal alone with biogas as provided for in the delegated act – he explains – we should allocate more than 20% of European arable land to corn and triple current production. We are talking about an area as large as all of France. And if, as the law still says, from 2036 we wanted to replace all gas with biogas, it would take 80% of the arable land. We are talking about an incentive to produce a disaster comparable only to what soybean and palm oil are causing in Asia and South America ”.
“The draft must be changed”
According to Bonaccorsi, «the draft law is not based on science but on the wishes of politics and lobbies, so it must be totally changed. If the Commission insists on this path – he warns – it will have to face the noisy dissent of civil society, the scientific community and even the financial one “. Bonaccorsi also takes it out on the Minister of Ecological Transition, Roberto Cingolani and heavily criticizes the government’s energy policy: “The opinion of the technicians actually rejects the Italian plan that focuses on gas and de-legitimizes the minister’s statements on nuclear power, an energy source excluded without appeal from the platform experts. On energy policy this government reveals itself for what it is: a member of the most backward part of Europe, an actor in conservation, lacking vision and contacts with the scientific community ».