Intergenerational

Excerpt

"Two times three makes four, widewidewitt and three makes nine, I make the world as I like…" Ursula von der Leyen must have taken this song from the Pippi Longstocking movie as her inspiration when she and the EU Commission presented their new EU Taxonomy Regulation at the end of 2021. The regulation aims to define what sustainable energy is and puts nuclear power and natural gas on an equal footing with solar, wind and hydroelectric power. This is a dangerous system, because it will surely be used to allow the EU to target its subsidies at the construction of new nuclear power plants and to encourage private investors to do the same. Brussels is putting up a smokescreen that will transform non-sustainable nuclear energy into "100 % green." Investments that should go into renewable energy sources will be diverted into unsafe nuclear reactors that produce hazardous waste and therefore will not help the economy to undergo a genuine transformation. We should not be investing in a technology which generates waste that no country on the planet has yet managed to set up a final storage facility for - over 70 years after the nuclear industry was first established. This is not what intergenerational equity and sustainability look like. …