With the visit in progress in these days of John Kerry – special envoy of the president of the United States for the climate – to Rome, it can be said that a new phase of transatlantic relations has officially begun. In a few months, Joe Biden ‘s US has shown that it wants to impress a clear break with the Trump administration on the major multilateral issues, starting precisely from the epochal challenge of climate change and the energy transition.
A turning point demonstrated both through facts (with Washington’s immediate reintegration into the Paris agreement and the formulation of concrete commitments) and with formal gestures with a high symbolic content. In this sense, the appointment of John Kerry should be read, a high-profile international personality and a leading man in the Democratic Party (he was a presidential candidate against Bush Jr. and Secretary of State during the Obama presidency).
Kerry’s prestige is similar to that held a few years ago by Al Gore , the first member of the American establishment to promote internationally the importance of not postponing the key challenge of global warming. It could therefore seem like a “return to the past” and to the dynamics that characterized the two terms of Barack Obama, but in reality the Biden presidency is moving perhaps even more quickly and courageously: nothing to do with the expectations of those who called the current US leader sleepy, who in a few months has given a clear direction to Washington’s foreign policy and which also goes in the direction of bringing the two sides of the Atlantic closer together.
Not only on the climate, but also on international taxation (with the proposal to establish a “global minimum tax” and to increase the tax levy on higher incomes to reduce inequalities) and on the thorny issue of vaccines (with the “unsettling” idea to suspend the patents on anti-Covid serums), the United States is showing its willingness to return to dealing with the great multilateral issues and to seek a cooperative approach, also in an attempt to embarrass adversaries such as China and Russia, which of the current system multilateral companies enjoy the benefits without always paying an effective commitment.
At the moment, Italy is therefore in an unrepeatable position. First of all, the political stability and international prestige regained thanks to the premierMario Draghi have made our country a finally reliable and authoritative interlocutor at European level, moreover in a phase in which Germany is “weakened” waiting to know who will be Angela Merkel ‘s successor and in which the United Kingdom must still find its “place in the world” after implementing Brexit.
Furthermore, Rome is at the center of this year’s major international events: the Italian Presidency of the G20, in which climate change plays a central role (a conference on “green” finance will be held in Venice in July), and the co-presidency – together with the United Kingdom – of Cop26, the United Nations Conference on climate, which will be held in November in Glasgow but which will be preceded by an important series of events in Milan during the month of October (and not and therefore it is a coincidence that this week Alok Sharma , the British President of COP26, also visited Rome .
In a year in which the US has returned to the center of the international scene and no longer constitutes a “brake” as during the Trump presidency, it could finally be possible for Italy to play a decisive role at the international level, exercising leadership on major global issues .
On climate and energy transition, Italy and the United States start from different starting positions but can come to an important understanding on the way to go. The US is a major producer of energy from fossil sources, but must progressively abandon the use of these polluting resources to meet the decarbonisation goals by 2050.
Italy, on the other hand, is not equipped with large energy raw materials and for this reason it must increasingly focus on energy efficiency (in the short-medium term) and on the expansion of renewable sources (in the long term). In between, therefore, there is a large common ground that offers joint possibilities to develop the “green economy” by generating important and profitable business opportunities, both at a production and financial level.
The joint declaration signed on Friday by Kerry and Foreign Minister Di Maio offers the diplomatic framework suitable for fostering such developments, expressly providing for joint actions to favor innovative technologies aimed at reducing emissions in agricultural and industrial activities. Therefore, the energy transition is welcome, if in addition to leading us towards a “cleaner” world, it will also offer us new opportunities for economic growth within the framework of international alliances strengthened with a historic friend of Italy like the United States.
