Interview
Greenpeace on the government’s recovery plan and offshore drilling
‘There are no areas in the Adriatic that are devoid of fish species. There is no place where you can drill without harm. It’s time to stop pulling fossil fuels out of the land and sea.’
We spoke with Alessandro Giannì, campaign director of Greenpeace Italy, about the resumption of drilling and the government’s recovery and resilience plan.
Yesterday [Friday] the Minister for the Ecological Transition, Roberto Cingolani, claimed he’d reached an agreement with you on the Recovery. What is that about?
We met remotely with Minister Cingolani. We expressed interest in connection with the goal of having 70% renewable energy sources by 2030. We will see what the results will be. I believe that on Saturday, Cingolani attended the G7 meeting on the environment which said they intended to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as set in the Paris Agreement. Greenpeace has put together a scenario for this; however, it is very different from what we’ve read in the “Recovery and resilience” plan and from the statements of the minister himself. When Cingolani will want to talk about it with us, we will be happy to do so, but there has been no agreement. For now, his ministry seems more like a Ministry for Ecological Fiction than one for Ecological Transition.
On the oil drilling, Cingolani claims that the project had already been authorized. If he hadn’t proceeded with it, he would have committed the crime of failure to perform official duties. Can you help us understand how things stand?
We find ourselves in this situation because the Plan for the Sustainable Energy Transition of Eligible Areas (PITESAI) has been put on hold. We have asked several times for an audience so we could understand what they had in mind on offshore. We do not approve of offshore drilling. We have shown in a report that there are no areas in the Adriatic that are devoid of fish species. There is no place where you can drill without harm. It’s time to stop pulling fossil fuels out of the land and sea.
On nuclear power, Cingolani said on Sunday that he was opposed to “ideology” but in favor of “market reflection.” A number of countries in Europe have been posing the question of whether nuclear fission micro-reactors used by large ships can be defined as “green sources.” If they were to be classified as such, “this would imply a big change of the rules,” he said. What are your thoughts on that?
That seems to me to be a perspective that has nothing to do with reality. To say that this portable nuclear power technology would be useful to fight climate change is madness. There is the prospect of nuclear fusion: that is an important technological effort from which interesting results could come, including in sectors other than energy generation. But the most optimistic forecasts predict the start-up of the first plants for around 2050, at a time when we should already have zero emissions. We seem to be living on two different planets. Here on Earth, we have to decide what to do now, not in 2050.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/alessandro-gianni-greenpeace-da-trivelle-e-nucleare-nessuna-svolta-ecologica/ on 2021-05-23