Environment, Climate, Energy
Goals
We want to ensure that future generations will have a base for a life in freedom and dignity. A healthy environment, biodiversity, sustainable use of resources, and equal and fair access to energy, food, and water are fundamental requirements for this. To ensure a safe future we want a fast transition to a clean, circular economy that reduces its environmental impact to net zero.
Environment and climate do not stop at borders. Energy also crosses borders in EU’s internal energy market. Suggestion: We need to strenghten European coordination in order to overcome both the energy and climate crisis. We want to establish EU wide standards that take transparency and auditability into account to ensure effective implementation and prevent greenwashing.
Environment - Sustainability
The PIRATES support the aims and principles declared by the EU to safeguard our water, air, soil, and natural environment for the sake of everyone’s well-being including the future generations.
Emissions must be minimised, existing pollution cleaned up, and natural habitats preserved and restored wherever possible. Voluntary measures by potential polluters are a prefered method but must be monitored closely, as they often fail to reach the targets.
A strict “polluter pays” policy has to be implemented to increase the pressure to implement more precaution and prevention. Environmental problems must be addressed at the source and not as an afterthought.
Environment - Biodiversity
The loss of biodiversity is an emergency that is connected to but not only caused by climate emergency. Biodiversity is lost at a pace unprecedented in our geological era and still it does not get the adequate attention.
This dramatic loss is not only tragic by itself, but can potentially cause a collapse of the world wide food production and other negative effects.
We appreciate ambitious goals set on EU and UN levels (namely EU Nature Restoration Law, UN Ocean treaty and COP15 Montreal goals and targets) regarding species’ habitat protection and restoration, relevant funding, prescribed measures, and transparency of enactment.
Environment - Transparent data
The public has the right for easy, timely, and reliable access to environmental data and the decisions based on it. This information should also include methods of monitoring and investigations.
Scientific advice and specifications that form the basis for administrative and legal decisions need to be sourced from independent experts. Participation in decision-making processes needs to be inclusive.
Environment - Consistent and effective rules
All environmental laws have to have a proper impact assessment and must only require minimum bureaucracy. Implementation needs to be tightly checked.
Regulations must not require registrations in every single EU country, a central registration should be sufficient so as not to obstruct access to the common market for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).
Currently, diverging national rules complicate sustainability work. EU should aim for a common system of labeling and recycling products.
Environment - Circular economy
Preserving and reusing resources by recycling is key to a sustainable economy. To ensure the long term availability of materials it is necessary to implement a circular economy based on the cradle-to-cradle principle, which considers the whole life-cycle of a product and makes the reduction, reuse and recycling of materials a part of the design.
Export of waste (sometimes disguised as used products) to third countries for substandard recyling or disposal must be effectively restricted to make sure materials are not lost or destroyed.
Climate
The policies which are being adopted under the European Green Deal strategy must be in line and go beyond the original European and international climate commitments.
Climate - No time to lose
Most necessary technologies for achieving the climate protection goals have been developed and are already in use, it is necessary to roll them out in large scale.
The PIRATES want to provide the legal tools for these technologies to be deployed as fast as possible, by incentives for using technology that is climate neutral and elimination of incentives for technologies that harm the climate.
All subsidies for activities impacting the climate negatively must be phased out, this includes financing or providing securities for financing climate damaging projects abroad.
Climate - Stop carbon leakage effectively
Emissions of greenhouse gases for imported goods, (i.e. resulting from power generation at the production location) should be attributed to the importing countries. Imported goods must be taxed to account for carbon leakage, to stimulate more climate friendly production for goods imported to the EU.
Climate - Not just CO2
CO2 is the largest part of greenhouse gas emissions, but other emissions have to be controlled too. Gases with high climate impact have to be reduced, replaced, and contained. All emissions of climate active gases have to be controlled and reduced.
Climate - Reverse emissions
The greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere are already too high and must be reduced. We want to stimulate projects that capture greenhouse gases and use them as base materials for products and chemicals. The use of such projects for greenwashing must be prevented, they must not produce certificates that allow emissions at another place.
The expansion of natural carbon sinks should also be considered.
Climate - Get prepared
Even if we were able to stop greenhouse gas emissions right now the climate crisis would not stop immediately. We will have to face changes in weather patterns, precipitation, and sea level increase. Critical infrastructures like food supply, transport and energy will be negatively impacted, heavy weather can cause catastrophes. To mitigate those effects, we have to prepare our infrastructure, cities, coastlines, agriculture and forestry for the ongoing change.
Energy
We want to establish a sustainable and reliable energy infrastructure that offers as much participation and transparency as possible.
With the increasing imperative role of renewables the number of privately owned electricity generation is exploding, former consumers become a mix of consumer and producer, energy cooperatives take the local supply in their own hands. The legal framework has to be adapted for this new situation where no longer only a few large companies make up the energy market.
Our future development, including building a circular economy, depends on energy. We have to make sure that we have clean, reliable, and abundant energy available.
Energy - Becoming sustainable
The transition from fossil resources to sustainable and clean energy sources is necessary. Energy sourcing must not be in conflict with other environmental objectives or agriculture for food production.
The technologies with the lowest environmental impact must be prioritized and their construction supported.
Energy - Becoming resilient
Recent events have shown the negative impact of being dependent on the import of energy resources in times of crisis. The EU has all the necessary technology and resources available domestically to build an energy system without critical dependencies on outside countries. We want to build and maintain European production capacities for all components necessary for a transition to a green economy.
Energy - Becoming efficient
The “energy efficiency first” principle must be in the heart of all European policies. For this goal we want to support energy efficient technologies and the transition of energy sectors to electricity as the primary energy form. By eliminating energy transformation steps a lot of losses are eliminated too. By electrifying transport, heating, and many industrial processes the required primary energy is dropping, though the need for electricity is going to rise.
Energy - As local as possible, as central as necessary
The European electricity grid is efficient in compensating temporary fluctuation in demand and supply and preventing regions from getting into trouble in case of local supply problems. However, it is not efficient in transporting major parts of the energy for a whole country across the continent and would produce bottlenecks that can lead to major failures.
Primarily production and demand should be matched locally as much as possible and the European grid should act as a safety net.