Bulgarian Environment Minister says climate policy is widely neglected

[24/11/2023 01:41]

SOFIA-Saba
Bulgaria's Environment and Water Minister Yulian Popov said on Friday in a conference on Bulgarian energy strategy and security that climate policy in the country is widely neglected.

The Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change, and many other agreements define to a very large extent the development of the Bulgarian energy sector.

The country's news agency quoted Popov as saying that if Bulgaria had a clear climate policy 10-15 years ago, not a single person would have come out to protest on motorways for the Maritsa power plant because such a problem would not exist.

Energy workers staged protests and blocked three major road junctions in the Stara Zagora area on September 29 to demand that their government pull out the Territorial Just Transition Plans for the coal-producing areas that were submitted to the European Commission on September 30.

In his words, the world has agreed on zero emissions anyway. Bulgaria is part of a global agreement, which is consistently followed and aims at zero emissions.

"I am very hopeful that we will have an energy strategy and we will be able to follow it, but we see that it is not Bulgaria but the world that is not able to follow an energy line, apart from the point of carbon neutrality. Ten years ago, energy in the world was totally different. Everything that was expensive then is cheap now, and everything that was cheap then is expensive now.

The energy economy has turned upside down. Ten years from now, the energy economy of the world will also be very different," Popov said.

There will be 250 people from Bulgaria at the annual UN climate meeting COP28, which starts next week in Dubai. This is not a government delegation, but a business and industry delegation, Popov said.

The conference was organized by Tsvetelina Penkova MEP (Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament) with the participation of government officials, researchers and businesses. It sought to present Bulgarian innovations in the field of renewable energy, energy efficiency and sustainable practices.