Driving forces behind the green transition

The climate and energy crises have dominated global headlines in 2022. Transitioning our economies away from fossil fuels towards renewables is key to both alleviating the climate crisis and helping economies regain their energy sovereignty. To this end, many countries worldwide have committed to becoming carbon neutral by the middle of the century or shortly thereafter.

Accelerated by the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, this situation has seen the emergence of Green New Deal narratives that seek to reconcile environmental and climate policies with economic growth. The European Union presented the Green Deal in December 2019 and South Korea introduced its Green New Deal in July 2020, both strategies to lead the green transition. The U.S. is planning massive public expenditure via a 10-year green transition investment programme through the Inflation Reduction Law enacted in August 2022.

Those developments were highlighted by several experts from Agora Energiewende during a one hour-long webinar, based on internal research in addition to comparative assessments supported by the Korean Foundation. We traced the emergence and development of these green strategies in the EU, South Korea and the U.S., and propose policy suggestions to refine them.

Claudio Baccianti, Project Manager EU Sustainable Finance at Agora Energiewende, and Saerok Jeong, Visiting Researcher at Agora Energiewende, presented the framework and policy implementation of the EU Green Deal and the Korean Green New Deal, respectively, while Janek Steitz, Project Manager at Agora Energiewende, introduced a new paradigm of greenhouse gas reduction driven by the Inflation Reduction Act in the U.S.

A Q&A session with the audience closed the event.

PRESENTATIONS
You can find the presentations of this event in the download section further down.

RECORDING
The recording can be found above.