Tuesday 10 March 2015
Media release from Denis Baupin and Ronan Dantec

A mixed Commission of National Assembly members and Senators will today examine the Energy Transition bill for green growth. Although the Senate debate led to notable improvements to the text, especially on the promptings of green senators, those advances have been outweighed by inacceptable steps backwards.

These steps concern:

• Power generation. The timing to reduce the nuclear component from 75% to 50% is moved out to 2025, contrary to the President’s undertaking, and the ceiling for nuclear power is raised to 64.8 GW, effectively making this ceiling inoperative.

• Energy efficiency. The objectives (to halve energy consumption by 2050, reduce it by 20% by 2020) are totally emptied of their substance.

• Wind power. An amendment imposes a distance of 1km between any wind-turbine and any home, which would kill off 90% of wind-farm projects in France, without the least objective justification.

These backward steps led the ecologist group in the Senate, logically, to vote against the bill.

We will sit as substitutes in the Commission. Our objective is to ensure that all those points are revisited and that a bill stained with such blemishes cannot be adopted. Given that France hosts the climate conference in late 2015, and that the collapse of the business model for nuclear power is obvious, it is all the more necessary to adopt an energy transition bill fitting in with the main orientations voted by the National Assembly. We will be vigilant and we will be mobilized to retain in the final text the improvements obtained in the Senate on certain articles. This is not only a necessity but also a great opportunity to create hundreds of thousands of jobs that can’t be shifted from place to place, and also to restore some purchasing power to our fellow citizens by reducing their unavoidable expenses for heating, lighting and mobility.

Denis Baupin, vice-president of the Assemblée Nationale
Ronan Dantec, vice-president of the Senate’s commission on sustainable development, infrastructures, equipment and management of territory.

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Remark by ACDN

It is good news that Denis Baupin and Ronan Dantec are protesting against the Senate’s deplorable amendments. Cf. our recent letter to M. Philippe Plisson, MP for the Gironde, in the Le Blayais constituency : La loi dite "de transition énergétique" devant la Commission Mixte Paritaire Assemblée Nationale-Sénat <http://www.acdn.net/spip/spip.php?a...>

Nevertheless, although it is " necessary to adopt an energy transition bill fitting in with the main orientations voted by the National Assembly”, that is certainly not enough. It would merely be preparing catastrophe in a less extravagant manner.