Energy Transition

The coming set of Sustainable Development Goals will seek to protect ecosystems, conserve resources, and, as with the Millennium Development Goals, lift millions of people out of poverty. Now that solid legal ground must be developed further.

Nowadays, king coal has more or less ceded his throne. The era of cheap, accessible coal has ended, and all three regions are faced with the same dilemma: what next? How can policymakers, civil society and the private sector replace the dying incumbent industries with green alternatives and create jobs at the same time? This dilemma, or rather opportunity, was the overarching theme of the Green Jobs Tour site visits, meetings, and roundtables.

How can we secure global prosperity anchored in a sustainable and balanced relationship between humans and nature? How to paint economic growth in green? The debates by the hbs and Norden Centrum in Warsaw and Wrocław took place as a part of the the 11th Planete+ Doc Film Festival after the screening of “Last Call”. Read the report by David Tischer.

In the course of the EU election campaign, the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk presented his vision for a European Energy Union, which is supposed to end European dependence of Russian gas, which he identified as the essential problem of European Foreign Policy in the Ukraine-Crisis. However, it encountered immediate criticism from green politicians. "Tagesspiegel" published  an article "Polen will die EU unabhängiger machen" ("Poland want to make the EU independent) (in German), where strong and weak sides of the proposition by Tusk are thorougly analyzed. Green voices are represented by Irene Hahn-Fuhr, director of the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation in Warsaw, and Rebecca Harms, Co-President of the Greens/ EFA in the European Parliament.