Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-11-29-Speech-3-024"
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"en.20001129.6.3-024"2
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"Madam President, these negotiations were always going to be hard but Commission officials believed that a deal would be done at the end of the day because political leaders across the world simply had too much to lose by returning home empty-handed. It is a matter of huge disappointment that agreement was not reached and I very much regret that the end of the convention was marred by a dispute between Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister and the French Presidency over the compromise proposals he put forward.
The fact that after Mr Prescott’s rather noisy departure, the Americans tabled new proposals, which came closer to the EU position, demonstrates that the French Presidency was right to hold firm. We were getting closer, but sadly time ran out. The fear is that the momentum has been lost and the American negotiators will change and we start afresh in May.
The disagreement within Europe is all the more regrettable because my overriding impression of the convention was of a European Union negotiating as a closely-knit team, from a position which crossed party lines and united Member States behind shared principles, a shared outlook and a shared sense of anger at the refusal of the Americans to face up to their responsibilities as the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases.
From all we have heard, we must assume that the US Senate will not ratify the Kyoto protocol, however hard we compromise. Therefore, we must give greater priority to bringing in and gaining the support of nations elsewhere, to getting emissions trading up and running, and to taking real action to reduce global warming gases in this Union. Let us hope we get agreement in May; in the meantime let Europe take the lead.
The USA remains of great importance. Money talks in American politics more than it does within our Union. US industry and the oil companies are telling their politicians that they must reject the Kyoto protocol, whatever the American public say. My question to the Commissioner is this: How can we persuade American industry that it is in their commercial interests to support the protocol, so that they pull purse strings and pull the American politicians into line? How do we drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century with all its problems?"@en1
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