Several environmental NGOs have attacked Tuesday in the EU courts the “green” label granted by the European Commission to gas, Greenpeace filing a separate complaint denouncing the extension to nuclear power of this classification of investments deemed sustainable.
ClientEarth, WWF, Transport&Environment (T&E) and the German organization BUND have filed a complaint with the European Court of Justice against Brussels’ refusal to remove gas from its “energy mix”.taxonomy of sustainable finance”. This text, presented by the European executive in January 2022 and adopted six months later, sets the criteria for considering investments as “sustainable”, with the aim of directing private funds towards activities that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The text includes nuclear power generation – which does not emit CO2 – and gas-fired power plants among the investments that can benefit from green finance, subject to conditions and on a transitional basis, deeming them necessary to support the growth of intermittent renewable energies (wind, solar, etc.) and the decarbonization of the continent.
However, “fossil gas is a source of energy with a high carbon content when burned (…) Its extraction and transport also lead to the release of methane”, a greenhouse gas with a warming power 80 times more powerful than CO2 over 20 years, the four NGOs deplored in a joint statement. “This is as absurd as it is illegal, and it fundamentally undermines the credibility of the EU’s climate action. Gas is neither clean, nor cheap, nor a secure source of energy,” they argue, pointing to the risk of “worsening the EU’s dependence” on expensive imported fossil fuels.
This taxonomy contravenes the “obligations of the Paris Agreement” on climate and is in “contradiction with the policies of public financial institutions” such as the European Investment Bank, they assured, fearing that the text “channels additional investments” to gas at the expense of renewables.
Separately, the NGO Greenpeace filed an appeal with the CJEU on Tuesday against the inclusion of gas but also nuclear power in the taxonomy of “sustainable investments”, denouncing a “false label” that could “divert green financing from their objectives”. “The inclusion of nuclear activities leads to significant damage to the environment, which is expressly prohibited” by the legislation that the Commission was supposed to translate with this classification, argues Roda Verheyen, a lawyer at Greenpeace.
The inclusion of the civil atom in the “green taxonomy” had sharply divided the EU-27, arousing the opposition of Germany and a handful of member countries, including Austria and Luxembourg – these two countries have also referred the matter to the CJEU.
