Can Europe afford climate policy in an energy crisis? – With Dan Jørgensen, European Commissioner for Energy and Housing

It sounds like you're advocating for a bit of a different conversation about the costs.

I mean, energy bills may be high right now, but the cost of inaction of dependents is maybe a conversation we should be having more.

Well, so for people that cannot pay their bill, it's not really a comfort to them, I think, that it could have been even worse.

I think we do need to take it serious, although to nuance the debate, we need to bring these arguments on the table also.

And I, of course, also mention it because some will be tempted to say we are on a wrong track, which, of course, we're not.

But I do think that we need to do more faster.

This is why we've proposed now in the EU, I proposed on behalf of the European Commission, that we strengthen our grids.

This is one of the things that is a bottleneck right now in many places.

We have hundreds of gigawatts of renewables that could actually potentially be online that's not online because of this.

And in the future, that challenge will be even bigger.

So I propose that we slash permitting times.

Now it takes easily five years to get a permit for a new wind farm, for instance, or to expand a grid.

And that needs to go down to approximately six months as a more general rule.

So that's one example.

We need to have more common European planning also.

So Denmark is doing great on renewables, yes, but The truth is that although this builds on great decisions made by many policymakers in decades in Denmark, had we not been as connected as we are to our neighbors because of the fluctuating nature of renewable energy, we could not have done it.

So you can only do this if you're connected to your neighbors.

And that's why we need to be more connected in Europe.

We're already more connected than, for instance, the US or China or others that we usually compare ourselves to.

But we're not connected enough.

And it's a job for me and the European Union to make sure that that happens faster.

Do you feel like some of the arguments that you're talking about now sort of travel well across those borders that we need to make connections with, or is it a hard, tall order to try and target the arguments that resonate with different people in different

places? I will say that it's primarily something that's positively received.

So when I ask for more European planning, it's obviously something that's overstepping a little bit because they feel that I'm taking away, potentially, power and influence from member states and giving it to the European Union.

That's not the case.