EU Scenarios for a Sustainable RES Strategy - The Sustainability of Renewable Energy in Europe - page 130

Our policy implication strongly affirms that EU 28 countries should act as a
single entity in such a way as to present the EU “as a single nation” in the world
when sitting at the world negotiation tables. The EU in the course of the history has
always been a leader in the intellectual, philosophical, and artistic fields with the
Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and then with the industrial revolution.
Today, that leadership is in question in the environmental field since the EU is
risking to become a residual area in the world. The EU currently represents only
11 % of global CO 2 emissions and in 2030 such share will be even lower given the
rapid growth of emerging areas of the world. In the environmental field, the EU
obviously cannot rely on a quantitative supremacy to impose its solution to the rest
of the world. Nor the EU can exploit the economies of scale at the world level. The
only way to be one of the major players on the world stage for the EU is to make
continuous technological innovations to be successfully disseminated to the rest of
the world. In this sense, the technological innovation should not be in “their own
backyard” but it must be widespread and accepted as a new paradigm in the world.
Otherwise “clean Europe” means that the EU produces less manufacturing in its
territories and it imports dirtier products from the rest of the world with particular
reference to the new emerging economies. In this way, the EU risks to lose competi-
tiveness in its own manufacturing system while contributing to increase polluting
emissions by buying abroad.
The real problem is that with all the restrictions, to which the EU must comply,
it becomes more and more expensive to produce in the EU and then the EU buys
goods produced where environmental standards are less stringent. There is here
a dilemma. On the one hand, stringent environmental constraints impose higher
and higher standards (costs) to European manufacturing system. On the other hand,
these higher costs in Europe are also likely to strangle the best existing technologies
that fail to keep up with these stringent environmental constraints.
Indeed, the EU risks to lose such technologies in favor of new locations that
have less environmental constraints and therefore can afford to produce at lower
costs. Leaving aside the classical issue of the manufacturing deindustrialization, let
us focus on the case of the European refining sector. There is a danger of closing
cutting-edge technologies in the EU because of the chocking environmental regu-
lation. Consequently, the European demand for refined products will be fueled by
neighboring non-European refineries characterized by lower environmental stan-
dards. This implies an increase in pollution at the world level because the goods'
demand from Europe continues and a welfare loss for the European producers.
With these considerations in mind, we believe that the EU can remain one of
the leading actors in the main of environmental policies by reunifying in a sin-
gle European strategy the 28 fragmented national policies. To this end, let us not
waste this opportunity by developing further the recent COM 2014 (0015) giving
a clear mandate to the new European Commission that started the mandate at the
end of 2014. In this sense, the EU might be able to overtake the USA still character-
ized by disharmonies between federal environmental policy and individual states
policies.