Turkey’s new Green Party will push for a “Green New Deal” that supports carbon taxes and increases the use of renewable energy, the movement tells The Media Line.
The party launched on Monday, the International Day of Peace, with 110 founding members, and handed in its application for registration to the Interior Ministry, its website said.
Party spokesperson Emine Özkan, 27, argued that a “Green New Deal” was the only solution to Turkey’s climate crisis.
“This new deal includes the structural transformation of energy and transportation sectors, increase in energy efficiency at all levels, creation of alternative and green jobs [and] improvement of life standards for all,” Özkan wrote in a statement to The Media Line.
Berk Esen, an assistant professor of political science at Sabancı University in Istanbul, said the party could appeal to 5 to 10% of the electorate who are urban, cosmopolitan, educated, and care about environmental issues.
While unlikely to win a national election, it could play a role in parliamentary politics, where parties need to pass the 10% threshold nationally to enter the legislature.
“As a minor party, part of a larger coalition, it can certainly have an impact,” said Esen.
Environmental issues have played a major role in Turkish politics.
In 2013, anti-government demonstrations across the country, known as the Gezi Park protests, were sparked by plans to demolish an Istanbul park.
Last summer, a mining project in western Turkey led to a wave of protests. Those opposed to the mine claimed the company would flatten the wooded areas that provide large amounts of oxygen and that the firm’s use of cyanide would contaminate water resources.
Esen said he does not think President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government is taking environmental issues seriously, saying Turkey is a developing country that needs to use its natural resources to fuel economic growth.
Özkan echoed this concern, saying that the biggest threat to Turkey’s environment came from those in power seeing the ecosystem as nothing more than a source of revenue.
“As a result of that ‘fossil’ mentality, we face in every single corner of the country a violent exploitation of natural resources and an eco-massacre,” she said.
Environmental problems are widespread in Turkey, from air pollution due to the notoriously bad traffic to importing plastic waste from Europe.
According to the European Commission’s Eurostat department, Turkey is the top destination for the continent’s plastic waste, importing 11.4 million metric tons in 2019. The figure has nearly tripled since 2004.
One issue that has garnered many headlines is the lack of green space, taken up by construction projects.
Supporters of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) say the projects fuel economic growth and provide jobs while improving the country’s infrastructure.
Erdoğan has highlighted these mega-projects during political campaigns. In the 2018 presidential election, he flew on his plane into Istanbul’s gigantic new airport before it opened.
Environmentalists are particularly concerned about a government proposal to build a massive canal that would run parallel to Istanbul, connecting the Black Sea north of the city, to the Sea of Marmara south of the city.
The state news agency says it will be 28 miles long and have an estimated 160 vessels a day transit it. The government held its first tender for the proposal in March.
Read rest at Jerusalem Post
The Green New Deal is a Scam
The day that unqualified, uneducated ‘environmentalists’ – new Luddites in green garb – learn that CO2 is the basic ingredient of the environment is the day I start taking them seriously. The only ‘scientist’ this article refers to is an “assistant professor of political science”. Poly-Sci profs have no connection to environmental, biological, or climate science. They have no connection to the practical effects of either energy on humanity or CO2 on the environment. Fossil fuels remain 85% of the world’s energy. They have made us the best fed, longest-living, most prosperous human beings that have ever existed. They have also recycled the basic ingredient of life on earth – CO2 – increasing it a tiny but entirely bountiful amount from its natural near lethal lows. For 600 million years, the basic ingredient of life on earth, CO2, has been naturally declining from concentrations nearly twenty times that of today – 7,000ppm – to today’s near oblivion level lethal lows – all life dies without CO2. This tiny but significant increase of 0.012% of the biosphere is 40% more of the abysmally low level of CO2. Within 30ppm of lethal lows during glacial phases of our ongoing Pleistocene/Holocene ice age. A little more CO2 has greened the environment by as much as 30% of the earth’s biomass. A little more CO2 has shrunken deserts by making plants more drought tolerant and reducing the number of stomata required to ‘breathe’. A little more CO2 has helped cause a string of world record crop yields. A little more CO2 has been a Godsend!