Meh, what can you expect? What with their windmills, North Sea oil and small population…
Amidst the on-going roiling European Union debate over the organization’s crisis, politicians in Brussels have been scrambling to construct a fiscal policy that will shore up the organization’s common currency, the Euro.
But the on-going hardball fiscal discussions have laid bare the fact that, quite aside from a common financial policy, the EU suffers from a number of sovereign disconnects as well, and one of the most notable of these is energy policy.
In Spain, the government is preparing to raise taxes on renewable energy generation projects along with nuclear power as an element in the government’s broad energy reform program to curtail the nation’s deficits, according to government sources.
Renewable energy sources will reportedly be hit hard, by up to $1.1 billion annually, with the country’s nascent solar technologies likely to bear the brunt.
At the figurative and literal end of the EU pole, Denmark is going full bore to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, seeking to reduce the nation’s dependency on them by 33 percent by 2020 and to achieve complete independence from hydrocarbon fossil fuels three decades later, by 2050.
Say who? Scandinavian environmental tree-huggers?
No – the Danish Ministry of Climate, Energy and Building, in its “Energy Strategy 2050” report.
Denmark, as one of Scandinavia’s most prosperous countries, currently has deeper pockets than fiscally strapped Spain, but the issue here stripped of political flummery is one of commitment.
* A previous version of this piece even misplaced Gro Harlem Brundtland as their PM but that, of course, was Norway’s problem, not Denmark’s. Apologies to both countries.
