The Minister of Agriculture, Food and the Environment, Miguel Arias Cañete, explained this week during the plenary session of the Senate that EU regulations state that all the income received from carbon dioxide emissions auctions has to be allocated, at least 50% of them, to policies to fight climate change. “90% of the estimated revenues from the auction of greenhouse gas emission rights will be used to finance the costs of the electricity system in terms of the sustainability of renewable energies,” he explained in the plenary session.

A guideline that allows incentivizing measures to help reduce CO2 while dedicating a significant effort to encourage renewable energies and to pay for their tariff deficit. In this context, Arias Cañete stated that the development of the Carbon Fund “is having very satisfactory results: we already have the first 40 “Climate Projects” approved and our companies have demonstrated that they have sufficient technological capacity to face the challenge of climate change”.

He also wanted to highlight that the Carbon Footprint project, the initiative that links the calculation and reduction of the carbon footprint in companies with the promotion of national sinks, as well as the Diffusos 2020 Roadmap, “the main instrument to channel the responsibility we have as a Government in this matter, for the determination of the path of compliance that will be marked by the European Commission in the coming months, for the preparation of national projections to 2020, and for the identification of the sectoral measures necessary to cover the gap between our projections and the 2020 target,” he said.