Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met this morning at Maximos Mansion with the Executive Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for a Clean, Just, and Competitive Transition, Teresa Ribera.
During the meeting, EU policies on the green transition and the proposals put forward by the European Commission to address the consequences of the energy crisis were discussed.
The Prime Minister stressed the need for a realistic approach to the green transition in order to ensure the competitiveness of the European economy and safeguard social cohesion.
At the beginning of their meeting, the Prime Minister and the Executive Vice-President of the European Commission had the following dialogue:
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Well, so good to see you, and I think you come at a very interesting time when there are lots of discussions about the path towards further decarbonizing our economy. When I look at the figures, I think that Greece has done a pretty impressive job in terms of reducing our CO2 emissions since 1990. And together with other southern countries, including Spain, we’re leaders in renewables.
We see the real impact in terms of the prices of electricity. They’re much lower than those of our neighbours. We have become a net exporter of electricity. We used to be a net importer of electricity. We completely moved away from coal, which is not the case for many other European countries. And we continue, of course, to use natural gas as a baseload power. So I think that we have every reason to continue to pursue that path. It’s good for the environment, it’s good for climate change, but it also makes economic sense.
But I would also like to discuss with you other aspects of our overall decarbonization strategy. It seems to me that there are areas and sectors where we can and should move very fast, and there are areas and sectors where we need to be slightly more cautious, especially those hard-to-abate sectors, which are also related to the core of our heavy European industry, and I would include shipping in that.
So my overall approach, without getting too much into the details -we can discuss them later- is that we need a more targeted approach, accelerate where we can actually deliver quick impact, be slightly more restrained while retaining the core of the ETS system, which we believe is valuable in terms of sending the right signal to all players that we take decarbonization seriously.
But there’s also a general sense -and I agree with that- in the Council that we need to look at the reduction of CO2 emissions in the context of supporting our industry and maintaining social cohesion. So I’m very interested to hear your thoughts on this. But again, welcome to Greece.
Teresa Ribera: You have placed it very rightly. I think that today we realise that it is not only because of climate reasons but because of economic performance, because of economic security, because of competitiveness in the time to come for our industry. And the secret is how we can keep on driving a process given the different circumstances that may be evolving, so as to ensure that we do not miss the direction of travel but that we introduce the updates, flexibilities that we may require.
And I think that that is quite good news also coming from the Council, I mean, being aware of the difficult discussions that you may have because of the messy global context, it is quite good to have this feeling that, yes, we cannot derail the long-term signals because we need them for competitiveness and for security.
We need to take the opportunities of this context to ensure that we can crowd in investment and not to crowd out investors, and that we need to introduce the flexibilities that could allow us to learn from the experience and to prevent any type of damage. And I think that it is not an easy task, but that’s part of what we are trying to deliver in the Commission.
My sense is that, as you said, the national circumstances are very different still, and that, yes, Greece has done an impressive work in the last 20 years, probably, through a very deep transformation of the system. There are fields where the challenge of remaining united and the challenge of being consistent in the global landscape, and to provide room for multilateralism, to keep the context are particularly difficult for the time being. And well, we try to figure out how to accommodate this double perspective. Because I think that that’s also important to keep and to defend how Europe in this point in time is also a reference not only for the European public opinion or the European industrials, but also from elsewhere, how we can handle in a consistent manner the different challenges, which is not an easy task when others do not favour so much cooperation but have a probably more transactional perspective on how to use their tools.
And the good thing is that, well, we have gone through different moments of difficulty, and we were able to overcome those difficulties, remaining united and finding the way to provide answers that could respond to the challenges of each of us. So I think that it is important not to underestimate the capacity of the Europeans to find a way forward.
Shipping is quite an important business in this country, and I try to work with the Commissioner dealing with transport. I am a deeply convinced person in terms of multilateral governance, and it has taken quite a long time to find ways to provide room for something that may be effective and fair. And I guess that we still need to identify the last mile in fulfilling this fairness and this up to date and fit for purpose solution under pressure.
