A fact-based project

I thank Ranier Fsadni for bringing up and discussing the Green New Deal in his article of April 23. It is healthy and refreshing to discuss some of the most important issues at the moment: how to tackle climate change, the financial crisis and how to generate new secure and sustainable jobs.

Dr Fsadni quotes extensively from Anthony Giddens's last book. I have not read Giddens's book, so I can only answer the article in The Times. Some say that it was Mr Giddens himself who inspired disastrous "projects" such as the privatisation of postal services in the UK.

Royal Mail became a private monopoly. This led to heavy job losses and the proliferation of short-term unsecure jobs. If Mr Giddens argues for a transformation of the state into the "ensuring state", a state whose main purpose is to enable action to take place while monitoring to see that stated goals are indeed reached, we should not follow his advice, unless we are in favour of lowering employment and job standards and security. Unfortunately part-time, unsecure jobs are the fastest growing types of jobs in Malta too.

The precautionary principle is accepted and applied through EU legislation. In evaluating a risk, it is not enough to consider only the probability of the risk happening but also the consequences if it does indeed happen. If consequences are catastrophic, even though the risk is small, it would be wiser to look for other options.

Just think about the effect on the sea and fishing industry, not to mention on our health should radioactivity leak from the planned nuclear power stations in Sicily, Libya and other North African countries; Malta and Gozo would be sandwiched between, thanks to populist EPP/conservative Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy and Muammar Gaddafi.

The claim that the Greens "have never developed a politics of government" is wrong. In fact, in seven years of Green participation in the German government, Greens have restructured the energy sector in-feed tariffs promoting solar, wind and water generation. In this sector alone, 250,000 new jobs were generated. Other successful examples of where Greens were or are in government, both at a city and national level, include Finland and Barcelona respectively, where their influence and policies generated jobs with a strong social and ecological dimension. The Irish Greens, who are in government, are also leaving a positive impact in the governance of their country.

The Green New Deal is based on facts. I can quote a host of studies by DG Environment of the European Commission, the report submitted to the G20 governments Towards A Global Green Recovery by Ottmar Edenhofer and Lord Nicholas Stern, the UNEP's A Global Green Deal, McKinsey consultants and the Wuppertal Institute.

The concept of a Green New Deal is also being promoted by, among others, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, the International Labour Organisation, employers and also various workers' unions.

Mr Fsadni objects the parallel drawn by Arnold Cassola between President Barack Obama's plan to invest $150 billion to generate two million new, largely Green jobs and the European Greens' call for an investment of €500 billion (about $652 billion, which is just 0.75 per cent of the EU's GDP) to generate five million jobs over five years. Generating jobs in the EU costs more for a very good reason. Thankfully, workers and employees in the EU on average benefit from much stronger social and health benefits than their counterparts in the US.

The laissez-faire attitude, greed and an economy based on speculation rather than the creation of real value is what brought us into this mess. By all means, Dr Fsadni, let us debate, discuss and put our heads together to challenge "standard criteria used by policy-makers to think about climate change". Let us turn the challenges we are facing on a national and EU level to opportunities for the benefit of all of us.

More information on the Green New Deal can be found at http://europeangreens.eu/petition/ . I invite readers to show their support by signing the Green New Deal petition online. It is important to have a strong Green group in the European Parliament and to vote Green on June 6. A better world is possible.