Galicia has the natural resources to meet 30 times through renewable sources its projected energy demand until 2050, according to data from a Greenpeace report presented on Monday in Vilagarcía de Arousa aboard the ‘Rainbow Warrior’, which has been visited in the last five days by 5,000 people during its scale in the Galician Community. Greenpeace has warned of the “especially dangerous” effects that can bring to Galicia climate change, as it will affect “significantly” on the temperature in general and on the surface of the water, or the rise in sea level, as well as reducing the productivity of the fishing sector.
30/07/2019
20minutos.es
The environmental organization has organized this Monday a press conference aboard the ‘Rainbow Warrior’, which bids farewell to Galician lands after five days docked at the port of Vilagarcía de Arousa in the framework of its campaign ‘Changes energy, not climate’, which aims to raise awareness about climate change and the need to reformulate the energy system. Thus, they warn that, in Galicia, a third of the greenhouse gas emissions come from the Meirama and As Pontes plants. The first, managed by Naturgy, will close in 2020, while the second, from Endesa, will run at least until 2045. In this way, the Xunta is asked to get involved in the bet for renewable energies to turn Galicia into an “active protagonist” of the energy transition, since “it is a country tremendously privileged in natural resources” and a community “with a very strong roots of the citizen community”. This Monday, Greenpeace has criticized Endesa’s refusal to date the closure of the As Pontes plant, “the largest source of CO2 emissions in Spain. In relation to the latter, the organization has put the focus on the fact that last April the “record” of CO2 emissions on the planet was broken, as it reached a level of 415 parts per million, a figure that “was not reached for 3 million years, ie before human beings inhabited the earth. DEMAND URGENT MEASURES The press conference took place on board the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ and was attended by the captain of the ship, Pep Barbal, and the head of the campaign, María Prado; the meteorologist on TVE Martín Barreiro, the spokeswoman for Fridays For Future Galicia, Silvia Mete; the coordinator of Teachers For Future, Miriam Leirós; and the energy democratisation adviser for Greenpeace, Sara Pizzinato. “The climate emergency needs a forceful response that is commensurate with the challenge we face. We cannot leave the response to climate change in the hands of those who caused the problem. It is time for the democratisation of energy so that citizens can participate in accelerating the energy transition,” said María Prado, who called on administrations to get involved in drawing up a legislative framework more favourable to self-consumption in line with the new European directive on renewable energies. For his part, the physicist Martín Barreiro has assured that “every day” meteorological phenomena occur “more frequent, more adverse and broader” that speak of “a very critical situation” at the atmospheric level throughout the planet. As an example of this, he has given the example of the record of maximum temperature reached in recent days in Paris and which is higher than the Madrid record, despite being a difference in latitude between the French and Spanish capital, which shows “the atmospheric chaos” that is currently experienced as a result of climate change.
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