Welcome to the new frontier of LNG doom. Via FTAlphaville:
This is a guest post by Rauli Partanen, an author, analyst and communicator on climate change, environment and energy systems. Partanen co-founded and leads Think Atom, a non-profit think tank advocating nuclear energy alternatives. In this post he argues Germany’s interests in natural gas are jeopardising the European Taxonomy for sustainable investments by scapegoating nuclear.
Europe’s taxonomy for sustainable activities is meant to make sustainable investment easier, providing the financing sector with an easy go-to place for defining activities that both significantly aid us with environmental goals, such as mitigating climate change, and which do no significant harm to other sustainability criteria. It was commissioned by the European Commission in July 2018 when it established a Technical Expert Group (TEG) to aid Europe’s decarbonisation transition. The group’s first report on sustainable activities came out just a year later on June 18, 2019 and featured a mixed analysis of nuclear. While the report said nuclear does have the climate credentials, it also stressed the need for empirical evidence on its sustainability over the fuel cycle — namely with regard to the storage of nuclear waste.
