Eve Borg Bonello: Tackling Climate Change Is Tough But Malta Needs To Do Better And Quickly
We have scientific evidence that human activity has mainly caused the Earth’s climate to warm beyond safe levels. In five years, the world is predicted to warm by an average of 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels.
This must be the upper limit for a global temperature increase. It is forecast to cause shocks to the stability of the ecosystem on which human life depends. Anything beyond that would be exponentially devastating.
We are already seeing those effects. Inhabited areas are suffering extreme temperatures with such frequency that they cannot be called extreme anymore.
More heat is more than a nuisance solvable by reaching for the air conditioner remote. It has knock-on effects on an intricate planetary system that distributes heat via ocean currents, and affects the biodiversity that plays an important role in absorbing harmful carbon dioxide.
But we know all this already. What isn’t clear is why Malta is afflicted by sluggishness in its climate policy.
The European Union, in a legislative process that includes Malta, is setting clear goals to where EU Member States need to be by 2030 and by 2050 in terms of energy and emissions. Since 1990, greenhouse gas emissions have gone down in Europe overall. This trend should continue, and legislation that is being debated now in Brussels should serve as a starting point and a guide for governments to lead change back home.
Energy must also change, both in terms of how we generate it and the way we consume it. Reducing our energy demand can make a sizeable dent in our emissions. But by 2050, Europe needs to be primarily reliant on renewable energy sources.
This is a huge task, one that has come into focus with the invasion of Ukraine. Climate change and geopolitical security have set the agenda and revealed the real scale of our energy realities. Shifting to renewables is at once a solution and a set of its own problems. It has the promise of generating jobs and revenues, securing energy supply within the Union, and ambitiously reducing emissions.
Precisely here is where successive Labour administrations have failed to make a dent.
In our National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP), the Maltese Government indicated that over a 10-year period, Malta will expand its share of renewable energy sources by an extremely modest 1.5 percentage points.
When the European Commission criticises Malta for lacking ambition, this is what it means.
The NECP is Malta’s climate bible. In it, the Government has the chance to offer vision, direction, and priorities for managing the delicate balance between energy, environment, and the economy.
What is contained in Malta’s NECP is a definitive conclusion that the last Labour administrations did none of those things. It is a massive lost opportunity for setting the national agenda, attracting investors where it matters, and leading the private sector on the right path forward.
With the upcoming climate legislation package being debated in Brussels, this Government has the last chance to prove it can convincingly make Malta a climate-neutral country while it still matters.
Yes, there are challenges. Nobody said solving climate change would be easy. But the alternative is much worse. Doing nothing deserves a far better explanation than what the Government offered in the NECP, which is that private interest in investing in solar energy “appears to be waning”.
We need to do better, quickly.
There are objective reasons hampering Malta’s progress. For starters, Malta’s population and economy boomed since joining the European Union. Comparing Malta in 2005 to Malta in 2019 is to look at two completely different countries. In percentage terms, Malta had the biggest increase in final energy consumption and a services sector that more than doubled in size.
Nobody is suggesting demolishing Malta’s economy. Climate action should go hand-in-hand. Yet Malta’s Labour-drafted climate plans do not make a genuine effort to lead the country out of the climate crisis. If it falls short of any plan for Malta’s green economy, it should at the least offer a genuine study of the lay of the land as a useful starting point that identifies the opportunities to get better.
It does not.
In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, Malta naturally had the lowest share of greenhouse gas emissions. But the other side of the coin is that we have by far the highest increase rate among all the Member States. This was not addressed by the NECP.
Moving Malta to the forefront of climate action is not about saving the European continent. There are other Member States with different realities, bigger economies, and an expanded scope toward leading Europe toward climate neutrality. Having heftier climate credentials will bolster our credibility on the European and world stage.
Malta needs investment. Before investment, it needs determined leadership. As we enter the post-pandemic, post-invasion economic slump, we have nothing to show in terms of climate progress. The aggravation is that we boasted the “strongest economy in Europe” for a decade.
We have a serious point to prove. There is no more room or time for excuses.
Eve Borg Bonello is a PN MP and spokesperson for climate change
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