GAVOI, SARDINIA — On the staircase to the mayor’s office of Gavoi, a screen projects the daily count of energy production and carbon emissions reduction from the solar panels that adorn the municipal buildings in this charming mountain town, as if suggesting that the direction of the energy policy for the second largest island in the Mediterranean is on target.

As thousands of climate advocates descend on Baku, Azerbaijan, this week for the 2024 U.N. Climate Change Conference, better known as COP29, Sardinian President Alessandra Todde reiterated her island’s intent to address the “climate emergency” through strong “collective action” in the Mediterranean, citing the recent flooding disasters in Valencia, Spain and the south of Sardinia.

But the roadmap for such collective action here — technically, Sardinia is an "autonomous region" of Italy, with its own government — presents a new path forward as a European climate leader on different terms. Sardinia has broken with the Italian government in Rome in a showdown over a "speculative assault” of private energy projects, political power and its implications of autonomous rule in an age of climate change.

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Thousands of protesters converged on the Sardinian capital of Cagliari last month to deliver an extraordinary package — more than 210,000 signatures from an island of 1.6 million inhabitants — on behalf of the “Pratobello 24” initiative, which aims to reclaim the region’s jurisdiction over urban planning, including renewable energy installations.

"Sardinia, like it or not, will not accept to passively suffer decisions made from above," President Alessandra Todde declared, in a salvo clearly directed at right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

In ways similar to protests seen from Greece to Australia to the “wind rush” in Brazil, and even in Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s protest against Europe’s largest onshore wind farm on indigenous Sami territory in Norway, the Sardinian rebellion emerges as a powerful cautionary tale: Central government officials must learn follow the lead of locally-based planners in addressing climate action.

Sardinians are quick to remind visitors that this crisis is more than a handful of wind turbines tilting above an archaeological site. Nor is it a simple “not in my backyard” complaint, of the kind echoed from Cape Cod to Ireland.

In an effort uniting often acrimonious political parties earlier this summer, the Regional Council under the newly-elected Todde passed an emergency 18-month suspension of a mind-boggling number of wind turbine and photovoltaic projects ushered in under former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi's administration in 2021 and meant to exploit Sardinia, among other regions, to meet European Union benchmarks for national carbon reductions.

That didn’t land well in Rome. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, still reeling from the electoral rebuke of her right-wing alliance in Sardinia's elections last........

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