Next Tuesday the EU Parliament’s ITRE committee (Industry, Research and Energy) will vote on the Commission’s RED II proposal. This directive will provide the framework for renewables support in the EU and will be a critical element to ensure that the EU can fulfil its climate target and do its fair share to keep global warming below 2⁰C.
The committee’s vote is a crucial step towards the adoption of the text in the European Parliament. It is therefore important to get it right before the text goes to the whole house for approval on 13 December. This is not an easy task in view of the complexities and sometimes unintended consequences of renewables support schemes.
While attending COP23 in Bonn it became blatantly clear to me that climate change demands urgent action in transportation. Simply waiting for full-scale electrification in transport – still decades upon decades away – is simply not an option. So far the transport sector in Europe has contributed far too little to getting carbon emissions down.
An ambitious renewables target for transport is one measure that would help move the decarbonisation of Europe forward. The 12% renewables target for the transport sector proposed by Rapporteur José Blanco López is a step into the right direction, in particular compared with the Commission’s approach that wanted no transport-specific target at all. But I think we should be even more ambitious: 15% should be the minimum target, but 20% represents a level that would provide for a meaningful and adequate reduction of CO2 emissions.
In Bonn it also dawned on policy makers and climate advocates alike that we need every sustainable solution available if we want to have a realistic chance of reaching our climate targets. There is no single silver bullet that can tackle the issue alone. Electrification is certainly critical to achieve the climate goals in the long term but cannot achieve the necessary emission savings in the short/medium term. One of the options we need to harness now is sustainable bioenergy and biofuels. In Brazil, sugarcane ethanol, a sustainable biofuel with 90% CO2 savings compared to petrol, has directly cut transport CO2–equivalent emissions by 370m tonnes in just 13 years. In contrast in the EU greenhouse gas emissions in transport are still rising.
Next Tuesday the ITRE Committee should make sure that the EU can use all sustainable solutions to fight climate change that are at our disposal. We can’t wait for the perfect solution. We need all available solutions NOW.
A seasoned professional specializing in international trade policy, Géraldine Kutas leverages over a decade of experience to strengthen UNICA’s activities across the European Union, the United States and Asia. She has a deep expertise in biofuels and agricultural policies, coupled with extensive exposure to multilateral and regional trade negotiations in agriculture. Ms. Kutas is the author and co-author of several international publications on these topics.
Before joining UNICA, she was a researcher and a professor at the Groupe d’Economie Mondiale at Sciences Po(GEM), Paris, and coordinator of the European Biofuels Policy research programme (EBP). Ms. Kutas has also worked as a consultant at the Inter-American Bank of Development and for agro-business firms.
Ms. Kutas has a Ph.D. in International Economics from the Institut d’Etudes Poliques de Paris and a Master degree in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University, Washington DC.