Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-03-10-Speech-1-131"
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"en.20030310.6.1-131"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I should first like to thank the rapporteur, Mrs Ayuso González, for tabling a really good report and for the excellent cooperation.
I think that here too, on the issue of biofuels, Parliament is continuing to honour its cross-party commitment to promote renewable energies. It is good to know that in our efforts to do so we can usually count on the Commission's support. I have serious doubts, however – and that is putting it mildly – as to whether the Council feels the same commitment as does Parliament to our joint target of doubling the proportion of renewable energies in the total energy consumed by 2010.
At the first reading, Parliament came out in favour of binding targets for increasing the use of biofuels. As with the directive on promoting electricity generation from renewable energy sources, this did not stand a chance in the Council. We have therefore agreed, as we did for the electricity directive, to indirect targets, with the option of moving to mandatory targets at a later stage if the actual rate of increase falls significantly short of the target set.
The Council's intention to give the Member States a whole series of opportunities for setting their national targets at levels which diverge from the prescribed 5.75% by 2010 is unacceptable. I very much hope that the Commission will scrutinise the reasons for departing from the indicative targets, which the Member States will have to provide, in a really very critical light.
Despite this critical assessment of the Council position, I can say on behalf of the Group of the Party of European Socialists that we will grit our teeth and vote in favour of the compromises contained in the Council position. Why? We want a shift towards renewable energies to be promoted in the fuel sector too so as to make a positive contribution to the necessary minimising of CO2 emissions, to reduce our dependence on oil and to give a boost to development in rural areas. To achieve this it is not only targets that we need; it is also crucial that the Member States should be able to give tax breaks to biofuels.
At the moment – and I will be quite open about this – this is our only possible course of action because the Council actually has our backs up against a wall. If the promotion directive does not go through the codecision procedure in the form that the Council wishes, then the tax directive – this has been made clear to us – will not be adopted.
I very much hope that the new European constitution will make such a situation impossible in the future.
Despite the shortcomings that I have identified, I hope and indeed I am confident that this directive, together with the tax breaks, really will give a further boost to increasing the use of biofuels."@en1
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