Читать книгу Derecho de la energía y el clean energy package - Elisenda Malaret García - Страница 35

Energy law has taken many important steps towards its recognition as an autonomous discipline in academic literature. Thanks to the methodological foundations created by Bradbrook’s work1 and the construction of the principles of energy law by leading scholars in: “A treatise for energy law”2, energy law has flourished as an autonomous and independent legal branch. Not only from an academic point of view, but the energy sector has proved its central importance in the global economy and in individual countries. From the oil crisis of the 1970s to the more recent one in Covid-19 era, from the liberalisation and privatisation processes of the 1980s and 1990s to the climate agenda for reducing CO2 emissions. The energy sector can only be approached by scholars and practitioners as an independent sector that has its own principles which guide the developments of the discipline and of the sector.

The questions can be asked why energy issues are becoming of huge relevance for legislators and policy makers? The increasing importance of this sector is due to the central role in the worldwide economies of the natural resources whose need is rapidly rising. The ongoing digitalization process reminds us of the steady need for electricity, of reliable technologies and energy sources for supplying the future demand. On the other hand, the energy projects are the main fear for the global warning and the general environmental protection. The world is moving through a transition in which all countries agree that sustainable development is the key. Economic growth cannot be stopped but it must be balanced with the safeguard of the ecosystem and it must be adhere to climate change issues. An interesting development seems to be the Global Pact for the Environment3, a project presented in 2017 at the United Nations Assembly and subsequently the subject of a 2018 Resolution called: “Towards a Global Pact for the Environment”4. The aim is to achieve a regulatory instrument that reaffirms the principles of environmental law as declared in Stockholm in 1972 and Rio in 1992 and that affirms the principles of energy law as complementary principles coming from an autonomous discipline. Hence the attempt to create a universal law of freedom aimed at mitigating human and environmental degradation. A universal law useful to find a balance between the need to explore, produce and consume energy and the need to preserve the global ecosystem.

Therefore, this article aims to analyse the developments of the principles of energy law in an evolutionary interpretation in the aftermath of their theorization and of the recent trends in the energy sector. Firstly, we need to find a clear and useful methodology to strengthen energy law as an independent discipline by marking a clear separation from environmental law and climate change regulation. In addition, making the principles even stronger and able to create a uniform legal and regulatory framework that can instruct States towards an energy transition for a sustainable society. The methodology chosen is the comparative analysis, the discipline of comparative law as an important tool to reconstruct energy law as an autonomous branch. This already happened with environmental law when the principles of soft law in international law for the achievement of actions to face common environmental issues have been transposed in other legal contexts such as European and National ones, thus labelling environment law as “law by principles”5.

Comparative science can give the same contribution to energy law in order to produce proposals and solutions elaborated on the basis of knowledge of other experiences that have similarities with the own legal system. A comparative energy law approach that aims to implement a legislative unification. A uniform regulatory system presupposes the overcoming of differences between legal systems and the harmonisation of legislation in order to prevent the occurrence of catastrophic events for the ecosystem. An emblematic example of legislative unification is certainly the European Union which through the introduction of a new legislative framework in 2019 such as the Clean Energy for All Europeans6 and the programmatic objectives set out in the Green New Deal7, aims at the unification of the energy policies and actions of the Member States to comply with a single objective i.e. an energy transition towards the reduction of CO2 emissions.

The comparative investigation applied to the energy law seems to be the further step to enshrine the energy law principles in the academic literature and to harmonize different legal framework with the aim of pursuing common objectives such as the climate and sustainability agenda. The aim of this chapter builds on the conference presentation made by Professor Heffron and highlights in brief the principles of energy law8. This paper has become a heavily cited paper and can therefore be said to be already making an impact on the energy law scholarship community, however, more needs to happen in practice. For a fuller account, see the original article which is open-access. We have reflected in this article some developments in EU energy policy in the context of energy law principles to reflect the wider movement of the original conference and also the European Federation of Energy Law Principles.