The first words of the new Minister of the Environment, Corrado Clini, highlight a precise objective. “Environmental policies will have to integrate more closely with energy, transport and infrastructure policies to achieve the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions”. According to Clini, the margins are very narrow and it will be difficult “to respect the timing of the objectives requested by the EU. But the real issue - he underlined - is to integrate environmental policies with all the policies of the other ministries and I hope that the new government will be able to do so. He will probably do it better than what happened before because in the Monti government there are no conflicts of political competence which perhaps limited the capacity of the previous one".
The main environmental associations seem to have welcomed these statements with optimism. "We expect your commitment to the Monti government to mark a positive turning point and a change of direction in Italian environmental policies, starting with those on climate change which, up to now, have been pursued according to a line of substantial brake on respect to the European targets for the reduction of emissions and the development of renewables”, commented Greenpeace, Legambiente and WWF in a joint statement.
In relation to a possible return to nuclear power, Clini explained that it is “an option on which we should reflect a lot, even if what happened in Japan has discouraged us. But basically nuclear technology still remains, globally, one of the key technologies. So yes, but under certain conditions.
