What is the real impact of the energy transition on the environment? | Tara Connolly on Net Zero

In this episode, Tara Connolly, EU Climate and Energy Policy Director at Greenpeace, reflects on the real impact of energy transition on the environment, in a candid conversation with Joana Freitas, Ambassador for the Lights on Women initiative of the FSR. While there is a big drive today in Europe to switch from fossil fuels to renewable sources, is all the emphasis on power generation enough to fight climate change? According to Tara Connolly, “decarbonizing the power sector is absolutely key”, but there needs to be more focus on other sectors, like transportation and heating and cooling. Tara Connolly also notes that, for the most part, “the technologies are there, it’s about putting in place policies that will support and accelerate their deployment”. However, a world with more renewables will also probably be a world with mass deployment of lithium ion batteries and increased mining of cobalt, which raises other environmental issues. For Tara Connolly, Europe should start by making sure that “the standards in these mines are as high as possible”, but “we cannot just be replacing every single internal combustion engine in Europe with an electric vehicle”. One of the key strategies to address the climate change is “understanding and accepting that we cannot keep the same system that we have going and just replacing it”. According to Tara Connolly, “we need to significantly downsize a lot of what we are doing”.

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