for a term of five years.The most important policy of this new Commission is the "European Green Deal", with a goal of making Europe the first climate neutral continent.This is an excellent idea, for various reasons.The most pressing is that it is way past time to scale up efforts to reduce fossil fuel use.Another one is that the necessary investments will be a motor for economic growth in the EU.And the transition to a renewable energy system is actually a race for the energy market of the next ten thousand years of human history.When oil was distributed between different countries as it is now, that was a random deal of the cards with no relation to any efforts of humans.Saudi Arabia does not enjoy its oil resources because humans living there a couple of hundred million years ago wisely decided to enable later oil production by planting trees.It received those resources by random luck.Japan just happened to draw a zero in the oil resources distribution.In contrast, whoever wins the race to get to a renewable energy system first will be able to sell their surplus energy to other countries who have been less alert.That translates into security of energy supply and extra income from the energy sold.This European Green Deal is also a new deal of the energy resources cards.To achieve the goal of becoming the first climate neutral continent, the Commission plans to mobilize funds at the order of one trillion euros until 2030 1 .This is not only the central policy of the new Commission, but also a policy that will receive very large funding.In December 2019, the EU Parliament adopted a resolution declaring "climate emergency" 2 .That resolution is very short.The main point is a declaration of emergency, asking for urgent measures to keep the temperature increase from global warming below 1.5 degrees.The resolution asks the Commission for far-reaching reform of all relevant policies.Radical emergency measures coming to mind are an immediate prohibition of gasoline cars, using all available military resources of EU member states for a massive and rapid renewable energy deployment and tree planting drive, or even a drastic policy like actually abolishing all subsidies for fossil fuels, as opposed to only promising to do so since 2009 3 .But this resolution does not contain any call for specific measures.While the EU was trying to solve the climate problem actively earlier as well, this is a new level of commitment.And this article will discuss some ideas on what the EU and especially the Commission can do to achieve their goal.The Commissioner in charge is Frans Timmermans, also one of the Vice Presidents.He remarked 4 that the situation is like a big comet was scheduled to hit Earth a decade later and destroy humanity without sufficient deflecting efforts.And he asked for the efforts to solve the climate crisis to have a similar level of urgency.Having used the exact same rhetorical device in a book about how to solve the climate crisis in one week 5 , I thought it remarkable that the EU Commission would engage in such strong language, but I agree completely with the sense of urgency.The new Commission has presented 6 the basic concepts of the "European Green Deal" on 11 December 2019, only two weeks into the new term.That presentation is more of a timetable for the work ahead and a collection of topics to be discussed than a final result, but it clearly shows that the Commission intends to put serious efforts into finding a solution.
Karl-Friedrich Lenz (Tue,) studied this question.