EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

For anyone wondering why gas, it's gas only in specific cases.

> Investments in natural gas power plants would also be deemed green if they produce emissions below 270g of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour (kWh), replace a more polluting fossil fuel plant, receive a construction permit by Dec. 31 2030 and plan to switch to low-carbon gases by the end of 2035.

Gas is included because the German """green""" party has heavily lobbied for it. The Belgians """greens""" announced that its okay for them to use gas, because overall, in Europe, other countries will offset it. Greenpeace lobbies for it because they, themselves, sell gas. Nuclear had to be defended tooth and nail for over a year, with active rejection from the Germans for its inclusion in that list.

Green parties across Europe are a pathetic joke.

I think Germans hope that new generation gas plants could be powered by hydrogen in the future[1]. The idea is that once we have cheap energy from wind and solar, it can be stored in hydrogen.

Problem is safe storage of hydrogen[2] and problematic relationship with Russia[3]

[1] https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/why-hydrogen-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage [3] https://www.politico.eu/article/nord-stream-2-gas-energy-pri...

There needs to be clearer terminology and labels for “green”, “sustainable”, “renewable”, “climate neutral” energy.

I’d also like to throw in “democratic” in the mix. Because energy and foreign policy can’t be separated. The EU energy mix is going to be geopolitically very important in coming years.

We also need to make it very clear what the goals are for each kind and where the tradeoffs are. I think right now the important focus must be to be climate neutral and I dependent of eastern natural gas. And if that means not being sustainable for a couple of decades that seems well worth it.

This seems to be about biogas plants which are allowed to run on natural gas for the first years. Not great, not terrible.

But the EU should stop basing policy on fuzzy goalposts that are easily moved like this.

How about instead of "radiation bad", we look at more objective metrics, like deaths/CO2 per kWh: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

And instead of comparing nuclear to a magical zero-pollution/emission, flawlessly safe, always-available power source, we should compare it to what it actually gets replaced with.