Stop climate change, switch to green power!

"80% of the energy we use whether for electricity, transport or heating comes from fossil fuels like coal, gas and oil. Burning fossil fuels causes serious pollution and leads to the emission of ever more greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, driving climate change. 

Energy production and transport alone account for over half the EU's greenhouse gas emissions: over 2,580m tons in 2006. Fossil fuels aren't just dirty, there's only a limited amount of them available and as ever more people want to use fossil fuels, the price and volatility of them, particularly oil and gas, will cause more damage to our economies.

 Nuclear power is not the solution. The nuclear industry is in decline and any expansion would not only be hugely expensive it would also take far too long to make any real contribution to the reductions in greenhouse gases we so urgently need. Nuclear remains dirty and dangerous with the problems of harmful radioactive waste and weapons proliferation ever present. 

Thankfully most of the solutions to our energy and climate challenges already exist. The quickest and most cost-effective step is to stop wasting energy. 

The Greens want the EU to adopt a binding target to reduce energy consumption by at least 20% by 2020. This would help save billions of Euros every year. And this means making our homes, both existing and new, more efficient, for example by renovating houses to reduce wasted heat energy. It means that household appliances, cars, and other energy using products, should be designed to use energy in the most efficient way. And all of this will help reduce our fuel end energy bills. 

We also need to make our businesses more energy efficient. Improving production processes, both in industry and the power sector, will cut costs for businesses which should ultimately reduce prices for consumers too. And apart from using energy better, we also have our own home-grown, ready-made sources of clean and safe energy: renewable energy.

We already produce electricity from wind, solar, biomass and hydro-powered sources, while biomass and biogas, solar and geothermal energy sources also help meet our heating needs. Only around 9% of our energy currently comes from renewables but the EU has committed to increase this to 20% by 2020. This will cut fossil fuel consumption by up to 300m tons a year and reduce CO2 emissions by up to 900m tons a year. That's the equivalent of taking 450m cars off the roads. 

The Greens want the EU to go further and move towards an economy that is based entirely on renewable energy.

For this we need to develop our energy infrastructure so that we can make the best use of renewables. Creating a super, smart electricity energy grid to connect up Europe will help us take advantage of the enormous potential of offshore wind power hubs like in the North Sea or solar power hubs in the Mediterranean and North Africa. But we also need to promote decentralised renewable energy production, like solar power, closer to the consumer. 

All of this will not only reduce our dependence on volatile fuel imports and help make us more self-sufficient, it will also reduce our climate-damaging pollution and create millions of jobs in Europe."