To rethink the overall climate and environmental policy of the European Union – a need and approaches

Abstract

The impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on the world economy, could be the reason for adopting a new point of view and a new perspective towards the climate and ecological policies of the European Union. Nowadays, the state of the art of the European behavior in the field of climate policy is that the EU countries are trying to compensate the lack of responsibility on the climate issues worldwide, with their sole own activities. Many states consider that as far as Europe is cleaning the environment, they get additional „quotas“ for polluting it. The EU needs allies and a new climate diplomacy in its efforts. The actions of the EU are going to be out of sense if the economic and demographic growth in India, Latin America and specially Africa doesn’t take into account the climate equilibrium. The actual paradigm of the climate policy of the EU, day after day proves its inability to work. Europe is not able to save the world alone. The problem is that the only offer to the potential partners is to ask them to limit their industrial and economic activities on a voluntary basis, without receiving anything in return. Europe must not change the final goal of its climate policy, but it must change its approach how to reach it. The new approach has to be rational and inspiring. Such an approach is the way of technological breakthroughs – strategic technological breakthroughs, which are going to bring advantages to all the participants in the process of limiting the green house emissions. We need a working alternative to the present approach of speeding and permanent raising of the quantitative dimensions of the goals of the climate policy – an administrative and primitive mechanical approach to a great extend. The EU has to pass a number of brainstorming discussions to generate ideas for technical decisions, which could be realistic alternatives of the present ways of electricity generation. Different decisions could be proposed. One important issue is the acceleration of developing a new generation of renewable energy sources (RES), combined with the development of the hydrogen economy. This is a search of a solution to the problem, that the renewables can not generate so called „base load“ for the electricity distribution network. The idea is to create thermo‐power stations, working on hydrogen fuel. This way, we can „store“ the extra electric power, produced by the solar and wind renewables into hydrogen and oxygen, produced by electrolytic dissociation of water. Another possible technological breakthrough are the radical innovations in generating electricity by space based technologies. Microwave Power Transmission could be used for the „transportation“ of electricity from the space based photovoltaic renewables to the surface of the Earth. The expectations of futurologists like George Friedman are that this technology is going to be developed by the militaries and it could be implemented for civic purposes about the year of 2080. Friedman supposes that the developing of space based electricity generation is going to be „catalyzed“ by a global military conflict. The European statesmen have to give another direction of this historical development. The task of the reasonable statesmen is to accelerate the implementation of such innovative, radical technologies in a peaceful way. The EU is able to play a crucial role in the initiation of such a project. Countries that protect and preserve crucial natural resources, could be compensated by getting access to cheap and almost unlimited space energy supply. The third technological breakthrough has to be a „next day“ technology – catching, storing and utilizing carbon dioxide. Radical acceleration of forestry development has to be initiated by the EU.