Italy does not respect the climate agreements:fossil fuel financing for 1.2 billion

Italy will continue to subsidize international projects to extract fossil fuels with 1.2 billion euros, thus betraying the "Glasgow Declaration", the agreement made in 2021 during the United Nations COP26 on climate, with which Italy and Another 38 countries and financial institutions have committed to ending public subsidies for fossil fuels by the end of 2022. The “Glasgow Declaration” was launched on November 4, 2021 during the day dedicated to the theme of energy COP26 held in England, the XXVI Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in which the leaders of all the countries of the world meet to decide on the guidelines to be undertaken to respect theParis Agreement Of limit the growth of the global average temperature within 1.5 degrees.

According to oneanalyses published in September by Oil Change International, a research organization specializing in monitoring the fossil fuel industry, some countries such as the United States, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, will continue to guarantee public subsidies for the extraction of gas, oil and coal For 4.4 billion dollars. 

From what emerges from the monitoring conducted by Oil Change International, theItaly it is currently the ssecond public financier in the fossil sector, behind only the United States, while Germany is the country with the most projects in the approval phase.Italy is financing through SACE, an insurance-financial group directly controlled by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, three international extraction projects in Indonesia, Peru and Uzbekistan for a value of 1.2 billion of dollars, while other projects in Brazil, Mozambique, Türkiye and Vietnam are in the approval phase.

SACE he is certainly not new to these operations, in fact he is among them top six lenders globally and the first at European level for public support for fossil fuels.Between 2016 and 2021, the state insurer issued guarantees for more than 13.7 billion euros to the fossil oil and gas sectors.

Oil Change International and ReCommon, an Italian association that fights against abuses of power and the plundering of territories especially by the fossil fuel industries, they report That Italy's strategies and policies are among the most inadequate among those adopted so far.

The decisions of Italian government, in fact, they betray the agreement made during COP26 of the United Nations on the climate and go against all the appeals of the scientific community, and our country could be the one to lose first.According to a relationship of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in fact, Italy is one of the most vulnerable countries to the consequences of climate change.A relationship of theISTAT highlights how in 2022 they are 713,000 people died mainly due to adverse weather conditions and warns about "the extent to which climate change is becoming increasingly important also in terms of survival, in the context of a rapidly aging country".

Deaths due to extreme events, made more frequent by climate change, are increasing worldwide: floods, hurricanes, floods, extreme heat, drought, they are devastating entire territories and populations.Despite this, and despite the continuous calls from the scientific community and from Antonio Guterres, President of the UN, who remind us that we must stop using fossil fuels and finance the coal, gas and oil industries, many countries, including Italy, continue to subsidize the fossil fuel sector, responsible, according to the Climate Accountability Institute, del 69.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite a certain emergency rhetoric and the regular convening of summits that always promise to be decisive, every meeting point reached is regularly being disregarded.Italy is in "good" company and there are many Western countries that are not respecting the agreements made, especially after having had the pretext of the need to free themselves from Russian gas, in some cases even returning to financing coal to do so.The result is that the self-proclaimed "international community" is clearly off track in respecting its commitments, as certified from the first Global Stocktake, the report required by the Paris Agreement which takes stock of progress in combating the climate crisis, published on 8 September this year in view of COP28 in Dubai. While individual countries, unable to impose a change on their large fossil fuel companies, try to act by penalizing citizens with measures against wood stoves and old cars, as if these had a decisive role.In short, the world's powerful continue not to listen to the signals that nature is sending, and it is best to find a way to do so before it is too late, because as the great sociologist and philosopher Ortega y Gasset wrote, "I am myself plus my environment, and if I don't preserve the latter, I don't preserve myself."

[by Gioele Falsini]