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.