Reducing CO2 emissions in order to control global warming is the new challenge of world politics and especially the European ones. To carry out this transformation it will be necessary to invest thousands of billions of euros and for now it is not known who should do it and what are the expected returns for the companies that will commit huge amounts of capital to transform their factories and products with the aim of reduce polluting emissions. The European Union has launched a plan of 1000 billion over five years, but for the moment it is not clear how much public funds will amount to and what the realistically expected multiplier of private investments will be.
For the first year, 10 billion are available whose subdivision between countries is already arousing numerous controversies. In fact, some countries that are further behind in controlling emissions, such as Poland and Germany itself, should have much higher public funds than the virtuous countries which in recent years have invested heavily in decarbonisation by making their citizens pay a steep bill for installation of renewable energy plants that had higher production costs than traditional ones that use fossil fuels to produce energy. So Poland should have about 2 billion and Germany 7-800 million, while Italy will get less than 400 million.
Surely the push towards technological innovation and investment and therefore the renewal of the professional specifications of the workers will be able to restart the development machine while simultaneously ensuring a greater balance in the consumption of natural resources which will allow us to deliver a clean and livable way to future generations as, and perhaps better than, what the current generation has found. But to achieve such ambitious results it is necessary to start from a realistic analysis of the situation, understand well the economic and above all political implications of such a choice in order to avoid spreading only illusions which would then turn into a general aversion towards choices that would impose excessive sacrifices on citizens.
In this sense Chicco Testa, former president of Enel and current president of Sorgenia, and certainly an expert on environmental problems due to his past militancy among ecologists, recently presented at a seminar in Aspen some extremely useful data for placing "green" policies on a realistic level. First of all, these data tell us that, despite the alarms and the international agreements reached in recent years, such as that of Paris, global CO2 emissions continue to rise and according to experts, the peak will perhaps be reached in about ten years (see slides).
Above all it is crucial to note that the increase in emissions from 2000 to today it is mainly concentrated in the Asian regions (China in the first place) while the oldest industrialized countries have stabilized the rate of increase of these emissions. However, if we look at the per capita emissions, the situation appears very different: the USA emits a quantity of CO2 per inhabitant more than double compared to China, while Europe, after the entry into the Union of the Eastern countries, more backward in terms of of the environment, is on the same level as China. India comes in last place with the amount of emissions that is nearly 10 times less than the US.
It is clear that in this situation it is difficult to ask for sacrifices from the more recently industrialized countries, who have a good time accusing Western countries of having polluted extensively in the past and therefore of now having to bear the greatest sacrifices. While countries like India have no intention of slowing down their development in order to reduce CO2 emissions given that their citizens individually have a very low amount of emissions. Even in the West, raising the prices of goods that cause pollution too much is not very welcome to citizens, as has recently been seen in France. And this is certainly a first political problem that is difficult to solve for anyone wishing to control global emissions from all over the planet.
Finally, what has taken place in the last two decades has been a decolonization of the productions with higher CO2 emissions from Western countries towards Asian countries which in this way have had dizzying growth rates with a corresponding increase in emissions. These goods which, in order to be produced, require high emissions of polluting gases, also due to the cheaper technologies used which certainly do not comply with strict Western criteria, they were then re-imported (semi-finished products and components) to Europe and the USA. In short, we have managed to be fairly virtuous by exporting the most polluting products to newly industrialized countries.
In this way we have avoided very costly investments (see what should be done in Taranto) and we have managed to maintain the price competitiveness of our products. The data illustrated by Chicco Testa certainly does not lead to the conclusion that it is not worth damning yourself to prepare policies that are so ambitious but also of such complexity as to cast doubts on their feasibility. But certainly to increase the chances of success of a truly green policy, you need to look at the data and start with a deep understanding of the current situation and trends. Otherwise we will continue to take to the streets with Greta to warn about the imminent end of the world, until people get tired of hearing the Cassandras and stop worrying.
