The consequences of ‘Gretism’. The surreal case of Biella

That the focus of a section of the environmentalist movement has shifted from climate change to the Palestinian issue is evident from the fact that Greta Thunberg has stopped holding her Friday school strikes to join the Gaza Flotilla. But now this anti-Israeli environmentalist wave has reached Biella in a paradoxical form: activists from Ultima Generazione have gone from blocking roads to prevent the construction of renewable energy plants to protesting to stop the construction of a photovoltaic plant. The project that must not go ahead is a 47 MW agrivoltaic plant in Cavaglià, in the Biella area, and in other neighbouring municipalities. Among the reasons for the opposition are those typical of any NIMBY movement, ranging from landscape concerns to the impact on PDO crops, even though agrivoltaics is precisely a system of panels raised off the ground that allows the land beneath to be cultivated. The real issue, if anything, is that agrivoltaics is too expensive and inefficient, but this has never been a problem for environmentalists.

The real issue – the insurmountable problem for Ultima Generazione – is that the company proposing the green investment, Econergy, is Israeli: “The transition is essential, but it cannot take place whilst ignoring human rights and the interests that fuel genocidal economies,” denounce the green activists. The M5S is also opposed to the project: “A licence for economic activity should be denied to any entity linked to Israel that has been implicated in the genocide in Gaza,” writes the party’s provincial coordinator. Even Legambiente, which is generally critical of NIMBY movements opposed to the energy transition, is calling on the province of Biella, through its “Dora Baltea” branch, not to authorise the investment for a reason “of an ethical nature”, namely that the capital is “of Israeli origin”, that is, it comes “from a state that is carrying out the extermination of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank”: these are “funds that have benefited from those bloody actions, thanks to the associated rise in Tel Aviv Stock Exchange shares”. The same argument is put forward by the Tavo Burat association, which “considers it morally unacceptable for Israeli investors to operate in our territory using financial resources that have grown as a result of the genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people”.

One might be tempted to think that this company, Econergy, is directly involved in military operations. But that is not the case. It has nothing to do with it. Nor is it even mentioned in the reports by NGOs calling for a boycott of Israeli companies operating in the ‘occupied territories’, as is the case with other energy companies. The accusation is that Econergy carried out a project in Bulgaria with funding from an insurance company, Phoenix, which in turn is accused by NGOs in favour of the boycott of having financed other renewable energy investments in the Golan Heights. And even if Phoenix has nothing to do with the agrivoltaic project in Biella, Econergy has an original sin: it is Israeli. And this is an objective fault: “It has benefited, even in the absence of direct responsibility, from this absurd upward trend on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, a market improperly rewarded by the financial markets for the Netanyahu government’s belligerent actions,” say the environmentalists. Climate change is no longer humanity’s most serious problem. Israel comes first.