Green Recovery For Europe | Leonardo Meeus, Georg Zachmann and Ditte Juul Jørgensen

In this special episode of Net Zero, Leonardo Meeus, Professor at Florence School of Regulation and Vlerick Business School, and Georg Zachmann, Senior Fellow at Bruegel, share their thoughts on how legislation and policy are enabling the energy transition in Europe. The special episode also highlights insights from an FSR online interview with Directorate-General for Energy, Ditte Juul Jørgensen, in which she discussed Europe’s green recovery strategy from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Back in June 2019, the European Commission published the last energy package – the Clean Energy for all Europeans package – aimed at accelerating the energy transition and giving all Europeans access to secure, competitive and sustainable energy. After this new legislative package, in early 2020, Ursula Von der Leyen presented the European Green Deal, a policy manifesto aimed at making Europe climate neutral by 2050. In Georg Zachmann’s view there are three key building blocks to achieve this ambition – i) set a carbon pricing mechanism to all sectors; ii) ensure a just transition, compensating those who somehow are negatively impacted; and iii) finance the transition, transforming the EIB into a European Climate Bank. A few months later to the green deal announcement, European economies start suffering record downturns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To support Europe’s economic recovery, in May 2020, the European Commission launches the so-called “green recovery plan” putting climate action and energy at the centre of the agenda. Ditte Juul Jørgensen sees the European Green Deal as “a growth strategy in itself” and a “very useful foundation and starting point for the recovery that we are now engaging in”. The Directorate-General for Energy also points out three groups of energy policies driving this green recovery: i) buildings renovation; ii) scaling up renewables; and iii) system integration. In what concerns system integration and sector coupling, Leonardo de Meeus highlights the importance of “shedding some light on the grey areas of regulation”. While the path to climate neutrality and economic recovery in Europe seems challenging, particularly regarding public acceptance and equality across member states and income brackets of the population, Georg Zachmann refers to several studies proving “how easy it will be to have climate policies for significantly lower distributional effects”.