EU efforts to rebuild Ukraine will focus heavily on decarbonisation and other green agenda goals, senior Brussels officials have said.
The European Commission has confirmed that EU efforts to rebuild Ukraine will focus heavily on the bloc’s green agenda goals, such as decarbonisation.
Many climate change-obsessed officials in the European Union have frequently cited Russia’s war in Ukraine as posing an opportunity to reduce carbon emissions, with German climate change minister Robert Habeck even previously saying that the Volodymyr Zelensky administration’s “real problem” was its use of coal, as opposed to the fact that a foreign army is occupying large swathes of the country.
More subtly echoing this provocative statement, EU commissioner Kadri Simson confirmed that efforts to aid Ukraine both during and after the war will focus heavily on the bloc’s climate goals, with Brussels keen to push decarbonisation efforts in the invaded nation.
“The Commission is already engaged to ensure that, despite the ongoing war, Ukraine reconstruction is green and centred around a decarbonised energy system,” Simson said in response to a question from an MEP.
The commissioner attempted to buttress his views by linking it to the war, saying renewable energy systems would be ” decentralised and less vulnerable for targeted attacks” by Russian forces.
She also claimed that more decentralised green energy sources would alleviate some pressure on the country’s energy grid and help keep homes and other public amenities supplied with electricity.
Simson appears to be suggesting that such sources be used alongside more traditional fossil fuel power generation methods, such as diesel generators.
In this way, the commissioner’s desire for green energy in the invaded nation appears to diverge from other climate-obsessed politicians on the continent, with other officials seeing the war as an opportunity to further distance Europe from fossil fuels.
One particularly radical politician, German climate change minister Robert Habeck, has seen the conflict as a way to force both his own country and Ukraine off of fossil fuel, describing Russia’s invasion as an “invitation” to push climate ideology even further. Halbeck, in one of those ironies of modern green politics, it also dead-set against nuclear energy despite it producing zero-carbon electricity.
Habeck even previously suggested that Ukraine’s “real problem” was that it was still burning large amounts of dirty fossil fuels such as coal, and seemingly not the fact that Vladimir Putin had invaded the sovereign nation with well over 200,000 troops loyal to Russia.
“The fact that over 90 per cent of Ukraine’s electricity currently comes from coal, gas and nuclear power plants is the real problem for the country,” he said.