Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-07-01-Speech-1-073"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20020701.5.1-073"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Mr President, Commissioner, I am taking the floor once again on behalf of my fellow Member, Mr Dominique Souchet, who was the other draftsman in the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development and who worked on the fiscal aspects.
I shall not return to the political argument but, as you know, market forces dictate that, for two major reasons, biofuels cannot currently be developed spontaneously in the European Union.
The first reason is that the price of fossil fuels does not include external costs generated, firstly, by the use of a non-renewable resource – namely, oil – and secondly, by very high greenhouse gas emissions.
The second reason is that oil companies benefit from the advantage of having a century’s worth of industrial experience, which has enabled them to optimise industrial costs on an enormous scale.
It is therefore perfectly legitimate for Member States to use differentiated taxation – a formula which we believe to be much fairer than considering cuts in excise duty – taxation that would encourage the competitiveness of fuels of plant origin, which are renewable and do not contribute to the greenhouse effect.
It would therefore be a matter of transforming excise duty on car fuels into a type of eco-tax that would be higher for fossil fuels than for renewable fuels due to the punitive external costs of fossil fuels.
The Commission’s tax proposal should help to enable the European Union to meet the objective set out in the Green Paper on the security of energy supply, namely of achieving 20% use of substitute fuels in road transport by the year 2020.
The amendments adopted in the Committee on Agriculture seek to make this Directive more effective, by emphasising that the by-products of biofuels produced in the European Union provide materials that are rich in plant protein which can be used in animal feed; by abolishing the totally arbitrary limit of 50% of the tax differential; by abolishing the time limit of 31 December 2010, since the external costs in the oil sector are permanent; by applying complete tax exemption to fuels used in biofuel production, which is already the case in the manufacture of oil products; by pointing out that cuts in excise duty can only apply to biofuels produced in the European Union, otherwise the European Union would not benefit from either reduced greenhouse gas emissions or from protein fodder crops that are produced as a by-product."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples