What can be done to ensure that the energy-climate transition finally becomes everyone's business?

Authors
Publication date
2021
Publication type
Journal Article
Summary States are now at the forefront of those accused in the relative failure of policies implemented to meet international commitments, particularly those of the Paris Agreement. Two years after the "Affair of the Century" collected more than 2 million signatures, the courts ruled in February 2021 that the French state had committed a "fault" by failing to meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction commitments for the period 2015-2018. Today, NGOs and experts are denouncing the Energy Charter Treaty, signed in 1994 and little known to the general public, which protects foreign investment in the production, exploration and distribution of all energies within the European Union. This protection allows investors to take their case to a private arbitration court to request compensation (in the order of a billion euros) each time a government modifies the profitability of an investment through its energy and climate policies. The petition that calls on Europe to get out of this treaty has almost a million signatures. Among the youngest, the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg has initiated strikes of thousands of students, urging governments to tighten policies against global warming. Other whistleblowers denounce, in addition to the States, the economic and financial sectors as being primarily responsible. All these actions testify to the awareness, within society, of the importance of the climate, and the wish that institutional and economic actors move "from words to deeds". But isn't the desired success in the fight against climate change "everyone's business"? Let's look again at the room for maneuver and the difficulties to be overcome by each type of actor in order to meet the objectives of the energy-climate transition.
Publisher
The Conversation France
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