Ideas for a green planet – Corriere.it

Fate has reserved a privilege for Roberto Cingolani that many would gladly do without sharing with him: being in positions of responsibility at the intersection of international crises on which the country’s future depends. A few days ago he was appointed CEO of Leonardo, the Italian defense and aerospace group, in an era of geopolitical tensions in which Italy and Europe will be forced to strengthen their military capacity. But even before that, Cingolani went through another emergency as a protagonist: the most serious energy crisis in over forty years, which overlaps with the threat of climate change, against the background of which Italy has around 70 billion euros of funds at its disposal Europeans to invest in order to change the model with which the country moves, heats up or feeds the fifth or sixth (depending on the year) manufacturing industry on the planet.

Physicist with great international experience, founder and long-time director of the Italian Institute of Technology, Cingolani found himself managing these circumstances when he became Minister of Ecological Transition in Mario Draghi’s government. Saying it wasn’t one without care restful is an understatement. During the Draghi government, Vladimir Putin has cut the supplies on which 40% of Italy’s gas consumption dependedthe price of gas in Europe went from twenty to 380 euros per megawatt hour, while Italy managed the presidency of the G20 and the COP26 on climate in Glasgow (in co-management with Great Britain) on the themes of the crisis and energy transition.

The country has gone through these trials better than anyone could have imagined before facing them, if only they had been imaginable all together. Now an illuminating book has come out, in which Cingolani sums up his experience on an intellectual level as well as concrete answers: Rewrite the future (Solferino). Written with the collaboration of experts such as Stefano Agnoli, Gilberto Dialuce, Francesco Gracceva, Ennio Macchi and Giuseppe Zollino, the essay opens a window on the thought system of the former minister starting from the basic approach. Page after page, it emerges a rational and motivated rejection of the answers that Cingolani defines as “ideological”while the challenge of climate change is not denied at all, but described in all its crudeness: “In some areas of the globe the warming peaks have exceeded five degrees Celsius – he writes – and it is estimated that sea levels have grown by twenty centimeters in a century», to the point that «coastal cities are in danger, at this rate the oceanic islands risk disappearing in a few decades», while «the waters warm up influencing the rainfall which becomes much more violent».

The lesson of the book is that an open approach to all available technologies is needed, even if they are different in the different national contexts, combined with an international leadership capacity that for now is lacking in the European Union. Cingolani’s approach to the green transition is far from three positions that are all too recognizable today: the denial of those who would like to do as little as possible; the line of Frans Timmermans, vice president of the EU Commission and head of the Green Deal, who seems to think Europe should set a good example to the rest of the world and then the other governments will follow; the simplifications of an environmentalism based very much on protest and utopias and little on feasible proposals. None of these ways lead far, explains the former minister.

It does so with the evocative power of someone who has met the protagonists and experienced the events firsthand. This can be felt, for example, in the short and deadly portrait of Greta Thunberg. «She and many other young people must be recognized for her commitment to raising awareness – writes Cingolani -. Greta is a media phenomenon well supported by a staff of people who organize her agenda and prepare the contents of his interventions. But also for Greta and for all the activists the protest has value only if it reaches concrete proposals within an acceptable time». After all, adds Leonardo’s CEO, “this volume was conceived along a precise line: to write to prevent the tendency to over-simplification that creates irreversible damage from perpetuating itself”. His is a point-by-point rebuttal of what he bluntly calls “disinformation.”

Politically interesting is the criticism of Timmermans’ line, which can be summed up in the idea that Europe must achieve more ambitious emissions reduction objectives than the rest of the world and must do so through a single approach: rapid transition towards renewable sources, combined with a ‘just as fast electrification of mobility. Cingolani does not disregard either one or the other objective. But he notes that alone they are not enough: neither technologically nor politically. On the first, for the former minister, it is a mistake to bind oneself in advance to a single transition model because the capture of CO2, geothermal energy, the transformation of waste into energy, synthetic fuels, green chemistry and new nuclear technologies can also help . On the political level, then, Cingolani makes it clear that setting a good example is not the way to exercise leadership – let alone in the face of emerging giants – in a world traversed by tough geopolitical, industrial and technological rivalries. What is needed instead is Europe’s more serious negotiating capacity with three powers that account for almost half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions: China, the United States and India in order.

In other words, Brussels cannot be the world’s schoolteacher, a role that no one recognizes for it, but must play politics. Cingolani writes: “If all our efforts were conducted without involving the big polluting countries, our improvement would be thwarted by any minimal increase in the latter”. It’s still: “It is not enough to be locally virtuous. Instead, we must work on a global solution to the problem” because “this is the ecological transition: something that cannot be tackled with ideological fury or by proposing simple and equal solutions for everyone”.

His is not a convoluted way to ensure that Europe or Italy find an alibi to escape the climate challenge, nor a praise of complexity as an end in itself. After all, it is a return of Cingolani to his first job: that of the educator.

The volume

Roberto Cingolani, Rewrite the future. The fair and accessible ecological transition. Written in collaboration with Stefano Agnoli, Gilberto Dialuce, Francesco Gracceva, Ennio Macchi and Giuseppe Zollino, the book is published by Solferino (pp. 154, euro 16).
Roberto Cingolani (Milan, 1961), physicist, in 2005 was appointed director of the Italian Institute of Technology Foundation of Genoa (IIT) where he remained until 2019. Member in 2020 of the Committee of experts in economic and social matters set up to deal with the “phase 2” of the Covid emergency, from 13 February 2021 to 22 October 2022 he was Minister of Ecological Transition in the Draghi government. He has just been appointed CEO and general manager of Leonardo.