Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-10-Speech-4-034"
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"en.20021010.1.4-034"2
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"Mr President, I would like to start by thanking Mr Moreira Da Silva, who, by dint of a vast amount of detailed work, has made a useable proposal for discussion out of a very poor proposal from the Commission, one that actually ought to have been rejected outright. So, many thanks to him, for what your office, Mrs Wallström, has produced, is not up to the standard of quality needed if protection of the environment is to make progress across Europe. Not in eight and a half years have I come across such a poor proposal for a directive put to this House, so you can be grateful that Parliament eventually had the opportunity to improve certain aspects of this feeble effort. So much for my introductory remarks.
My second point is that I unreservedly agree with Mr Lange that, if this proposal is to become reality, it must incorporate flexibility under fair conditions. Fair conditions are required not only because individual Member States of the European Union have already achieved a great deal whilst others have not, but also in view of the relevance of emissions trading to competition. Everyone imaginable in this House has had something to say about the USA and the bad guys over there, only then to say that this is actually a tax on energy. Mrs Corbey said that electricity produced by nuclear power must not receive favourable treatment. What the Commission has proposed does not actually meet its own conditions. It is a bureaucratic monster, utterly ineffective in environmental terms, and this cannot be blamed on Kyoto and justified by reference to it, because Kyoto, Mrs Wallström, was signed by the Member States. In Kyoto, the Member States committed themselves. The Kyoto Protocol refers to six greenhouse gases, you to only one. The Kyoto Protocol commits the Member States. You want to impose obligations on businesses. The Kyoto Protocol puts the Member States in a position to make use of any instrument. You want to make the Member States' responsibility null and void by using the Commission's bureaucracy. The Kyoto Protocol is effective from 2008 to 2012. Your mandatory emissions trading begins as early as 2005.
The Kyoto Protocol has at least three instruments, of which you use only one, and, most of all, you violate the most important principle, one on which the international community has agreed, that the world at large should cut back on CO2 wherever this can be done most cheaply and quickly. It is quite clear, though, that what you are proposing here is European internal trade, which will not have any effect on anyone else, and will cost between EUR 20 and EUR 33 per ton of CO2 equivalent. You have incorporated neither of the other two instruments in your directive at all. The Kyoto Protocol strives for a mix in which the cost of EUR 6 per tonne of CO2 equivalent should apply, and if you do as you have proposed, the result will be factories being closed down and jobs being relocated. We will achieve no positive outcome on a worldwide basis, and that is why we are in favour not only of fair conditions, but also of letting the instruments compete until the Kyoto Protocol takes effect.
All fifteen Member States of the European Union have now undertaken to individually reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8%. The European Union has committed itself to something different, a different kind of burden sharing. The way this sort of burden-sharing works is that a country such as Germany, with its minus 21%, is playing a very large part, whereas Portugal, for example, is permitted an increase of a further 27% over against the 1990 basis. This is all very just and responsible, but now, when Germany and Great Britain are the only states to be able, even without the Commission's bureaucratic emission-trading monster, to point to successes, you cannot penalise them on the basis that those who did it voluntarily must now pay an additional penalty for having made a success of it. How, Mrs Wallström, is that sort of imposition on the Member States and on businesses meant to motivate them? As a German MEP, I can tell you that there have been reductions of CO2-equivalent in Germany amounting to 231 million tonnes since 1990. That is a massive amount. Over the same period, Spain, another Member State, has poured another 100 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent into the atmosphere. Penalising German businesses for Spanish omissions is the wrong way to go about things, and so I ask the House to support item 75, which is intended to give more responsibility to the Member States."@en1
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