Fundación Ideas para el progreso

The former Secretary of State for Environment with Felipe Gonzalez and Minister for the same branch as Zapatero, Cristina Narbona, affirmed at a lecture at the Menéndez Pelayo International University, that the EU’s leadership on climate change will be effective if the organization of European countries dares to carry out a technological model shift in which more emphasis is placed on a higher profile of renewable energy.

Narbona, who is currently Ambassador of Spain for the OECD and member of the Board of the IDEAS Foundation, has highlighted the need for promoting policies that bring CO2 emissions to a standstill and allow the EU to meet its 2012 targets which were referred to in the Kyoto protocol.

In that sense, the former Environment Minister wanted to make clear that the challenge is not only encouraging developed countries to contribute to environmental protection by reducing their emissions and changing their industry, but also by limiting their imports of goods made with highly pollutant methods in other countries.

Finally, Narbonne made allusions to predictions of the OECD’s Energy Agency which suggest that in 2015 “there will be a crisis between supply and demand for oil" that will, once more, shoot the oil price, remembering that Europe spent "ten times more to subsidize the coal than to investigate in renewable energy", a fact that has been denounced both in her Economic Report and the many public and private appearances of the experts affiliated with the Foundation IDEAS.