We are entrusting our future to fossil fuel giants masquerading as environmental champions. What happens when the big corporations start talking about clean and renewable energy?

We don’t need false solutions

Gas, hydrogen and mechanisms for offsetting emissions or capturing them are now at the heart of national and European energy policies. They are cast as “transitional solutions”, aimed at reducing emissions and leading us to a green future. In fact, they are tying us once again to an unsustainable fossil economy. A dangerous distraction from the necessary change of political and economic model that millions of people in Europe and around the world are strongly demanding.

Gas? Fossil, of course.

The gas sector is expanding despite its devastating impact on the global climate, which has emerged in all its severity only in recent years. Recent scientific studies have begun to quantify fugitive methane emissions from gas infrastructure and have shown that their climate-changing impact is more than 100 times that of CO2 over a 10-year period and 86 times over a 20-year period.

Hydrogenomania

Hydrogen tops the list of the “miracle solutions” promoted by business-as-usual climate policy makers. But what’s behind the green energy pipe dream? Currently, less than 1% of the hydrogen produced in the world comes from renewable sources, for the rest we still rely on fossil fuels; and this is unacceptable. Even if we were to use renewables, to produce enough energy in Europe, we would have to exploit energy and environmental resources that we do not have and that we would once again have to “extract” from the neighboring African continent.

All that glitters is not green.

Mobilizations, direct actions and campaigns have succeeded in jamming a machine that seemed unstoppable, producing a short circuit that was as necessary as it was unexpected. Today it is possible to talk about the environment and climate change even on the news and in newspapers.

But the debate is often dominated by the fossil giants with their impressive greenwashing strategies, creating a distorted narrative of energy transition, thanks to huge economic investments. Energy corporations also have on their side a coordinated and very powerful lobby oriented to influence European and national policies on climate and energy.

What we want:

We oppose an energy transition from coal to gas and the construction of new gas-fired power plants; eliminate public subsidies for them, and close existing plants as soon as possible.

No new gas infrastructures should be built in Italy or in Europe, and public subsidies and funds should be allocated to other interventions that are genuinely sustainable and decided by local communities.

Justice must be achieved for all those who have suffered from the impacts of large-scale energy projects.

The promotion of a decentralized, bottom-up, small-scale approach to renewable energy with the active participation of local communities.

Energy companies to make a concrete, time-bound commitment to reduce emissions to zero, avoiding false solutions such as fossil hydrogen or large-scale green hydrogen infrastructure, offsetting mechanisms (carbon capture and forestry) and mega renewable energy plants.

Investors divest from large Italian energy companies (such as Eni, Snam, Enel) that still use fossil fuels and that resist change through adopting false solutions to the climate crisis.