This article, first and foremost, aims to frame the climate change phenomenon in the international context in order to highlight the impact of public energy policies on global warming. Than the article focuses on analysing the provisions of the Directive 2018/844/ EU and the centrality foreseen in it, of energy efficiency and therefore on capturing the role of local governments in designing cities. The smart cities model, combined with the transition of electricity generation from a centralized model to a distributed one, promotes various virtuous scenarios in terms of pollution’s containment. Therefore, it would be appropriate to provide political support in terms of economic incentives, aimed to encourage the bottom-up thrust, promoting investments aimed to develop smart cities and to create new small energy producers, which represent the natural and physiological framework of the new distributed and decentralized energy model.