The European right’s assault on the Green Deal doesn’t scare Teresa Ribera. “Ursula Von der Leyen has given me a vice presidency: It’s a signal that [the green agenda] remains a priority. Environmental transition is one of the great engines of the approaching economic and industrial transformation,” said the Spanish minister for environmental transition in an interview with the daily El Pais, published on September 19.
The 55-year-old socialist from Madrid has accepted the position offered to her by the European Commission president: The first executive vice presidency, in charge of a “clean, just and competitive transition.” This energetic woman with strong environmental convictions is making something clear to those who think that the new configuration of the Commission – which divides environmental competences between various Commissioners – will not allow her a free hand: Her term will consist of “coordinating” EU policy in this field. “The directorates-general are under the mandate of the Commissioners, and that’s fine…” she said.
A trained law expert, she has fought many battles, including the one that enabled her to wrest an “Iberian exception” from Brussels in 2023. It is a mechanism designed to cap electricity prices on the peninsula on the grounds that its lack of interconnection makes it a kind of energy island on the European continent. For the past 20 years, the retired senior civil servant and former professor of philosophy of law at the Autonomous University of Madrid has been fighting climate change and promoting the energy transition.
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In 2005, under José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s Socialist government, she was already director of the Spanish Climate Change Office, which had just been set up to promote sustainable development policies. From 2008 to 2011, she was secretary of state for climate change. But it was in Paris that she forged her international reputation, as director of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), whose role was key in the negotiations of the 2015 Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.
A fervent opponent of nuclear power
In 2018, when Pedro Sanchez called her to join his “dream team,” a woman-friendly ministerial cabinet with a strong emphasis on political scientists, she took the bull by the horns to make a U-turn in the country’s energy policy. Her first measure, designed to break with the previous Conservative government, was to abolish the “sun tax,” a 7% tax applied to self-consumption of electricity, something which had put the brakes on solar panel installation in one of Europe’s sunniest countries.
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Publish date : 2024-09-30 19:44:00
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