SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 1 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The island group Sí Podemos Canarias in the Cabildo de Tenerife has expressed its “resounding” rejection of the decision adopted by the central government to liberalize the installation of regasification plants in the Canary Islands and has reproached the Cabildo for supporting this “crazy” proposal.
Likewise, Sí Podemos Canarias accuses the Government of Spain of using the pretext of the economic crisis generated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “to open the door to unsustainable development policies such as the installation of a regasification plant in Tenerife.”
Sí Podemos Canarias has reiterated its position “totally contrary” to allowing the start-up of a regasification plant on the island, since “it is a polluting fossil fuel that has many extraction problems, in addition to a resource whose days are numbered , so its use is limited in time”.
The insular group pointed out that natural gas “is a very deficient energy resource and that it entails a high economic cost.” In addition, he declared that, being a fossil fuel, “it entails a clear increase in the price due to taxes, which will be higher and higher, and the tolls or the losses that have to be paid to the companies; all this will end up being paid by the citizens in your energy bill.
After knowing the positions of the Government of the Canary Islands or the Cabildo de Gran Canaria against the approval of this rule, the island group Sí Podemos Canarias is running “in favor of good sense and the voices that have shown their rejection of this decision by the central government” , and criticizes that the president of the Tenerife Cabildo “celebrates this measure, which would represent a clear blockade of the commitment to the implementation and penetration of clean energy”.
In this sense, Sí Podemos Canarias highlighted “the inconsistency and the confrontation of contrary positions within the PSOE itself, since in Tenerife the opposite is carried out to what is publicly defended by José Antonio Valbuena, socialist councilor responsible for the Ecological Transition area in the Government of the Canary Islands”.
Sí Podemos Canarias denounces “the lack of vision and the position in favor of the regasification plant maintained by PSOE, Cs, CC and PP in the plenary session of the Cabildo de Tenerife in May 2021, since it is a pronouncement that goes radically in against the ‘Declaration of Climate Emergency’ decreed at the beginning of this mandate by this same corporation, backed by all political forces”.
The insular group recalls that multiple international organizations “have already ruled on the need to work together towards the elimination of natural gas, something with which the Cabildo de Tenerife shows that it does not agree by supporting this crazy proposal.”
“Among the organizations and entities that have issued pronouncements against the regasification plant, the Supreme Court, the National Securities Market Commission, the European Investment Bank, the Port Authority, the Government of the Canary Islands and the PSOE of the Canary Islands itself stand out,” they add from Yes We Can.
According to the insular group, “the installation of a regasification plant in Tenerife would mean promoting a crazy and highly polluting measure, in relation to the implementation of the energy model based on renewable energies, in which we should already be working more actively, thus advancing towards decentralized, participatory and democratic renewable generation”.
Sí Podemos Canarias pointed out that despite the slight reduction in CO2 that this system entails -between 25% and 30%-, the methane emissions produced in the handling of natural gas “generate enormous amounts of this substance, which is 86 times more dangerous than CO2 in the face of global warming”.
The political group defends that the only possible path to follow from the Canary Islands “is towards the full use of clean energy, since it has the natural resources and the necessary requirements to become a model territory in which our energy is generated completely renewable, thus diversifying the current model, contributing to the energy self-sufficiency of our territory and democratizing energy”.
