BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 10. Europe needs a
Marshall Plan for energy, said Wopke Hoekstra, EU Commissioner for
Climate, Net Zero and Clean Growth, in his Keynote speech on the
‘Clean Industrial Deal: decarbonisation, competitiveness, and
resilience for a more sustainable and prosperous Europe’ during the
EU Sustainable Energy Week, Trend reports.
“EU will continue to invest in the technologies that will power
cleaner, more competitive, and more self-sufficiently in the
future. If we want to be truly successful, we need to make this
Clean Industrial Deal work. We need something that is at the heart
of your work, the heart of where you are active, and what I would
call a Marshall Plan for energy,” he said.
Hoekstra pointed out that climate change is a harsh reality, a
pressing reality for our ecosystem.
“It’s also very much an economic reality, and unfortunately, it
will only become more so in the years to come. Europe easily gets a
penalty, gets a fee of climate damage in the range of 50 to 100
billion a year in terms of economic damage. And the bad news is
that that number in the years going forward will only go up because
the world and the planet are heating up,” said the
commissioner.
He noted that Europe is heating up roughly twice as quickly as
the rest of the planet.
“So, we will see more devastation. We will see more flooding,
more heavy weather, more events that will come with a much higher
cost. And climate change is also more and more about economic
security, clearly about energy freedom, about never being taken
hostage again by rogue states like Russia.
It is about strengthening our supply chain, whether that’s on
defense, on tech, or on critical raw materials. And it could be, as
many of you know already from today and from the jobs you’re in
yourself, it could be about creating high-quality jobs in a
competitive circular economy, truly moving into clean tech. And
therefore, I will continue to articulate that decarbonization is
about climate, competitiveness, and independence,” said
Hoekstra.