Goals
We want to ensure that future generations have a base for a life of freedom and dignity. A healthy environment, biodiversity, sustainable use of resources, and equal and fair access to energy, food, and water are fundamental requirements for this. To ensure a safe future, we want a fast transition to a clean, circular economy that reduces its environmental impact to zero.
Environment and climate do not stop at borders. Energy also crosses borders in the EU’s internal energy market. We need to strengthen European coordination to overcome the energy and climate crises. We want to establish EU-wide standards that take transparency and auditability into account to ensure effective implementation and prevent greenwashing.
Sustainability
The Pirates support the EU‘s aims and principles for safeguarding our water, air, soil, and natural environment for the sake of everyone’s well-being, including future generations.
Emissions must be minimised, existing pollution cleaned up, and natural habitats preserved and restored wherever possible. Voluntary measures by potential polluters are a preferred method. However, they must be monitored closely, as they often fail to reach the targets.
A strict “polluter pays” principle has to be implemented to increase the pressure to implement more precautions and prevention. Environmental problems must be addressed at the source and not as an afterthought.
Biodiversity
The loss of biodiversity is an emergency connected to but not only caused by climate emergencies. Biodiversity is lost at a pace unprecedented in our geological era, and still, the issue does not get adequate attention.
This dramatic loss is not only tragic by itself. It can potentially cause a collapse of worldwide food production and have other negative effects.
We appreciate the ambitious goals set on the EU and UN levels (namely the EU Nature Restoration Law, UN Ocean treaty, and COP15 Montreal goals and targets) regarding species’ habitat protection and restoration, relevant funding, prescribed measures, and transparency of enactment.
Transparent Data
The public has the right to easy, timely, and reliable access to environmental data and the decisions based on it. This information should also include methods of monitoring and investigations.
Scientific advice and specifications that form the basis for administrative and legal decisions must be sourced from independent experts. Participation in decision-making processes needs to be inclusive.
Consistent and Effective Rules
All environmental laws must include a proper impact assessment and must only require minimum bureaucracy. Implementation needs to be tightly checked.
Regulations must not require registrations in every single EU country. A central registration should be sufficient so as not to obstruct access to the common market for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Currently, diverging national rules complicate sustainability work. EU should aim for a common system of labelling and recycling products.
Circular Economy
Preserving and reusing resources by recycling is key to a sustainable economy. To ensure the long-term availability of materials, the EU must implement a circular economy based on the cradle-to-cradle principle, which considers the whole life-cycle of a product and makes the reduction, reuse, and recycling of materials a part of the design.
Export of waste (sometimes disguised as used products) to third countries for substandard recycling or disposal must be effectively restricted to ensure materials are not lost or destroyed.
Climate
The policies adopted under the European Green Deal strategy must be in line and go beyond the original European and international climate commitments.
Climate – No Time to Lose
Most necessary technologies for achieving climate protection goals have been developed and are already in use. Now, it is necessary to roll them out on a large scale.
The Pirates want to provide the legal tools for these technologies to be deployed as fast as possible by incentivising climate-neutral technology and eliminating incentives for technologies that harm the climate.
All subsidies for activities negatively impacting the climate must be phased out. This includes financing or providing securities for financing climate-damaging projects abroad.
Climate – Stop Carbon Leakage Effectively
Emissions of greenhouse gases for imported goods (i.e. resulting from power generation at the production location) should be attributed to the importing countries. Imported goods must be taxed to account for carbon leakage to stimulate more climate-friendly production for goods imported to the EU.
Climate – Not Just CO2
CO2 is the largest part of greenhouse gas emissions, but other emissions must also be controlled. Gases with high climate impact have to be reduced, replaced, and contained. All emissions of climate-active gases should be controlled and reduced.
Climate – Reverse Emissions
The greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere are already too high and must be reduced. We want to stimulate projects that capture greenhouse gases and use them as base materials for products and chemicals. The use of such projects for greenwashing must be prevented, and they must not produce certificates that allow emissions in other places.
The expansion of natural carbon sinks should also be considered.
Climate – Get Prepared
Even if we could stop greenhouse gas emissions right now, the climate crisis would not stop immediately. We will have to face changes in weather patterns and precipitation, as well as sea level increases. Critical infrastructure like the food supply, transport, and energy will be negatively impacted. Adverse weather events can cause natural disasters. To mitigate these effects, we have to prepare our infrastructure, cities, coastlines, agriculture, and forestry for the ongoing changes.
Energy
We want to establish a sustainable and reliable energy infrastructure that offers as much participation and transparency as possible.
With the increasingly imperative role of renewables, the number of privately owned electricity generation is exploding. Former consumers are becoming a mix of consumer and producer; energy cooperatives take the local supply into their own hands. The legal framework has to be adapted for this new situation where the market is no longer made up of only a few large companies.
Our future development, including building a circular economy, depends on energy. We have to ensure that we have clean, reliable, and abundant energy available.
Energy – Becoming Sustainable
The transition from fossil resources to sustainable and clean energy sources must be accomplished. Energy sourcing must not conflict with other environmental objectives or agriculture for food production.
The technologies with the lowest environmental impact must be prioritized and their construction supported.
Energy – Becoming Resilient
Recent events have shown the negative impact of being dependent on the import of energy resources in times of crisis. The EU has all the necessary technology and resources available domestically to build an energy system without critical dependencies on third countries. We want to build and maintain European production capacities for all components necessary to transition to a green economy.
Energy – Becoming Efficient
The “energy efficiency first” principle must be at the heart of all European policies. For this goal, we want to support energy-efficient technologies and the transition of energy sectors to electricity as the primary energy form. Eliminating energy transformation steps also eliminates many losses. By electrifying transport, heating, and many industrial processes, the required primary energy will drop, even though the need for electricity is going to rise.
Energy – As Local as Possible, as Central as Necessary
The European electricity grid efficiently compensates for temporary fluctuations in demand and supply and prevents regions from getting into trouble in case of local supply problems. However, it is not efficient in transporting significant amounts of the energy for a whole country across the continent. This would produce bottlenecks that can lead to major failures.
Production and demand should primarily be matched locally as much as possible, and the European grid should act as a safety net.