Nuclear I can understand. But gas?
If this were up to the people of the EU (or their representatives in the EU parliament), it wouldn't stand a chance. They'd never declare gas green. But this decision was taken by the European Commission, a group that's not elected. And who leads the commission: von der Leyen, a German.
It's like when they forced truckers to continuously return to their home countries. [1] Romania has basically no competitive advantage in the EU, except a cheaper workforce. When eastern European truckers started dominating transport in western Europe, Macron forced the EU to change regulations and mandate that drivers must go home every 4 weeks, wasting fuel, and thus being less competitive.
[1]: https://www.transportnews.co.uk/2020/08/14/new-international...
The laws proposed by the European Commission still need to be accepted by the European Parliament as well, indeed the commission is basically fully subordinate to the parliament, so even if the European Commission was somehow "unfairly controlled by France and Germany", which I find highly suspect considering the specifications of it, the parliament is responsible in the end, and that consists entirely of elected representatives.
This sounds more like typical Brexit-style anti-EU propaganda than a valid summarisation of the politics of the EU.
> But this decision was taken by the European Commission, a group that's not elected.
The members of European Commission are proposed by their member state governments, one from each. Do you elect directly minister or most of the posts in government?
Commission and Council are appointed by national governments while only European Parliament is directly elected by citizens. Reason for this is that no national government want to lose the power.
Part of that advantage is that Romanian labor laws are less restrictive (the minimum wage is a third of the french one, for instance). So France had a choice between repelling labor laws to keep worker competitive, tell all french truckers they could kiss their job goodbye, or introducing some protectionism.
I'm usually in favor of free trade, even when it costs jobs, but in that case I think free trade would be a direct race to the bottom. Jobs performed in a country should respect that country's labor laws, otherwise companies will just shop around for the country with the least restrictive labor laws without even having to move their operation. Unrestricted european trucking went against that.
> tell all french truckers they could kiss their job goodbye
This was likely the correct option. It is okay in these cases to give these people substantial funds to ease this transition: the cost of saving-jobs in the broader economy is usually many times worse than paying off the replaced workers directly.
For instance, the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that the annual cost to the US economy of a job-saved by either Trump or Biden "Buy American" policies averages about $250,000/job/yr. This is several times what the job pays. In the case of steel tariffs, the cost of a saved job is $900,000/yr.
Better to allow the foreigners to work, tax the economy, and pay the French truckers the amount of their old salary to do literally anything else of value. Of course, this will never happen. It makes too much sense.
Problem is safe storage of hydrogen[2] and problematic relationship with Russia[3]
[1] https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/why-hydrogen-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage [3] https://www.politico.eu/article/nord-stream-2-gas-energy-pri...
https://www.livekindly.co/norway-ban-palm-oil-biofuel/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-palm-oil-deforestati...
Initially, Europe was thinking that biofuels would be a good way to support some counties, but the result was far from good.
Wind and solar are the best sources of energy, but lack of good grid scale energy storage make them impractical. Once we have good and cheap batteries to store energy, than solar and wind from Africa could resolve Europe energy needs. https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
It also avoid all kinds of social/human problems.
And even if it's not not climate friendly it's not much worse either.
So when Germany started subvention Bio Gas it didn't took long until people started growing stuff with the intention of having "a lot of was for bio gas" (as far as I remember).
Similar, probably worse, thinks happened in some "3rd world" countries as far as I remember.
Basically storing what can't be used at that moment. It does not matter if it is at 10 or 100% efficiency as if such storing methods did not exist the only other option would be to turn off those panels/wind turbines.
> Investments in natural gas power plants would also be deemed green if they produce emissions below 270g of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour (kWh), replace a more polluting fossil fuel plant, receive a construction permit by Dec. 31 2030 and plan to switch to low-carbon gases by the end of 2035.
This is about keeping infrastructure in place that can be retooled for a hydrogen economy [0].
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/europes-gas-firms-prime...
We cannot build a nuclear station in a desert, because it needs a river or a lake with fresh water for cooling. Nuclear station is the huge steam machine. It cannot work without water. Fresh water is a scarce resource. For example, nuclear station near to me (Rivne Nuclear station, North Ukraine) is at edge of closing since 2015 because of drought. It competes with the city for drinking water. The same situation is at Khmelnyck Nuclear station, Western Ukraine.
New reactors are better protected from mistakes, but they are not protected from evil intent. We are at the war with RF since 2014 and this is THE problem. We already had issues with drinking water in Dnipro river, which supplies lots of cities including capital, and food after Chornobyl, but Chornobyl was just a mistake, not an act of war. Potentially, a nuclear station has enough uranium to cause environmental damage equivalent to 1M of Chornobyls.