Ni has gone the problem nor Spain has equipped itself with the legal instruments needed to combat it. In these six months of political blockade of the evidence on the impacts of climate change have continued to increase through reports that alert you to the risks of the climb from the sea to the Spanish coast, and scientific studies that place the mediterranean region in the ground zero of this crisis. But Spain doesn’t have even with a law that bases agreed upon between the parties on how to combat climate change and how to prepare for the consequences which are already unavoidable.
This rule –that most of the parties say they want to take forward– it was necessary for the country to comply with the obligations of the Paris Agreement. Because the measures adopted until now will not allow Spain to comply with the emission cuts of greenhouse gases that must be done, as warned last Thursday the European Environment Agency through an evaluation report of the Twenty-eight.
But since that is closed in Paris that global agreement against climate change in December 2015, the lack of stability of the various Executives, the disputes between ministries and the advances election have been made not to approve the framework law of spain. “And the longer we delay action the more expensive it will be,” says Cristina Narbona, president of the socialist party and former minister of Environment. Is, remember, the “cost of inaction” that has already established more than a decade ago the british economist Nicholas Stern in his famous report on the economic implications of this crisis. Delaying these measures will make it more expensive in economic terms, but also more difficult to prevent the warming to reach the levels more catastrophic, as warns the group of scientists that advises the UN, known as the IPCC.
MORE INFORMATION
The climate law, which the parties say they want and no one approves Spain assumes the challenge of hosting in a month, the climate summit of the UN
The inaction can be reached by a political blockade as the living Spain or, directly, by denial of the problem as it happens in other countries. And one of the novelties of these last six months has been the emergence in the Congress and the Senate a party –Vox– that blames conspiracies marxist thesis of climate change and that, for example, blocked in the upper House a statement on the fire that hit the Canary islands during this summer because it was a reference to global warming.
But this attitude –similar to that of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, for example– has been encased in that stronghold of the parliamentarians of the extreme right; there has been a contagion effect of negationism to the rest of the formations. In some cases, even, the opposite has happened. A few days before it was dissolved in September the Parliament, all parties, except Vox, took on the gravity of the challenge, at least, of the word: so he came passed a motion in the plenary of the Congress in support of the declaration of a state of emergency climate in Spain. “You have to applaud that PP and Citizens to support the declaration”, underlined Juan Lopez de Uralde, a member of United we Can and driver of that text.
Uralde has been one of the protagonists, to their dismay, that another of the events green of these six months: the open fracture in Equo, the party ecologist with more tradition in Spain. The foundation of this training decided to abandon its partnership with United we Can and run in the elections together with Íñigo Errejón; Uralde, parliamentary by Vitoria and the face most recognized Equo until now, kept Can.
More Country, the formation of Errejón, has taken up the fight against climate change as a flag. But all parties, except the extreme right, posed by climate change measures. The PP, for example, regrets that in its program that the “political blockade” has prevented addressing “issues that can’t wait”, among which the cited “commitments in the area of climate change”.
Another thing is that the formations arise, measures are more or less ambitious, or more or less quick. “It’s not going to be easy consensus for the climate change act or the environmental taxation,” predicts Cristina Narbona on the new legislature should be open after the 10 of November.
The margin of the parties, from the 28 April up to now the streets of many Spanish cities have become more green. It happened with the great demonstration in July against the scheduled repeal (which finally did not occur) of the plan’s anti-pollution Madrid Central; with the manifestations of the strike of the climate of September 27, driven by the young people; with the protests in October of Extinction Rebellion; or with the historical march of a few days in Cartagena by the Sea Less.
Mario Rodríguez, responsible in Spain of Greenpeace, believes that one is living a “sociological change” driven by young people globally. “There is an outrage over the environmental degradation”, he says.
Rodriguez has no doubt that the streets will fill in when Madrid will welcome in December, the international summit of the climate after the resignation of Chile: “it Can be a great opportunity for the climate change back on the political agenda during the negotiation of the next Government”.
