Eleven former EU Commissioners sent a joint letter to the European Commission, on Tuesday 3 May, calling on it to ensure that short-term actions to move the EU away from dependence on Russian fossil fuels do not lock the EU into dependence on fossil fuels from other countries.
Written on the initiative of Connie Hedegaard and Pascal Lamy, the letter calls for “a deep (energy) system transformation” as “simply diversifying the import of fossil fuels will only serve to maintain EU energy dependence on other countries, many of which do not respect EU values”.
The eleven signatories therefore recommend increasing the ambition of some of the proposals in the ‘Fit for 55’ package, namely: the revision of the EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED II), the revision of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), the revision of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) and the revision of the CO2 standards for new cars and vans.
They also call on the Commission to withdraw its draft complementary delegated act to include fossil gas in the EU taxonomy as a transitional activity (see EUROPE 12921/26), as well as to adjust its gas package presented in December (see EUROPE 12854/11) in order to avoid ‘lock-in’ effects in fossil gas.
See the letter: https://aeur.eu/f/1gr (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)