Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-10-Speech-1-055"
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"en.20050110.12.1-055"2
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".
Mr President, even the recent tsunami disaster shows us how fundamental our relationship with nature is for ensuring the survival of human life and civilisation. Climate change is threatening precisely that, and therefore a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions has become an absolute priority and a factor that ought to underpin every decision on economic and social issues.
Europe has committed itself to the Kyoto commitments and to post-Kyoto, and that puts the spotlight even more strongly on the serious responsibility of the US Administration, which, however, is opposed even to ratifying Kyoto or to addressing the post-Kyoto period, as was supposed to have happened in Buenos Aires. Even Europe, I have to admit, is still a long way from playing its part to the full: it has allowed Kyoto to become distorted with the introduction of emissions trading and, above all, it is still a long way from putting its target emissions cuts into actual practice. In fact, emissions are still increasing and in some countries, such as Italy, they are increasing considerably.
We have to think about why that is happening. The fact is that it has been left up to mere market mechanisms to achieve the Kyoto targets. So far, they have not worked, while free-market globalisation has led to a multiplicity of distorting factors: production moved to countries where environmental legislation is weaker, thus increasing emissions; rich countries wasting more energy on transport and domestic uses; and the privatisation and liberalisation of the energy sector which, instead of producing savings and clean energy sources, has led to competition among traditional, polluting sources.
If – as we must – we want to implement Kyoto in practice and to go beyond it, we need to take a very different approach: we must channel all our efforts, in terms of scientific research, energy policy and infrastructure, into achieving that objective through a major strategic plan that is properly structured, adequately funded and based on democratic participation.
We need something that goes far beyond the old, obsolete market formulae and which instead represents the real challenge of a sustainable future: a new social and environmental economy, with a structure based on democratic principles and solidarity with the whole world. All that becomes even more obvious and inescapable when we think that Kyoto is just the first tiny step. In Buenos Aires, the US Administration prevented anyone from talking about what in fact needs to be done about the post-Kyoto period: that is to say, about a necessary, epoch-making change. I have to admit that the Italian Government allied itself with that reactionary stance.
That, then, is the real mission awaiting a different Europe, one that is able to talk to the whole world along these lines and, above all, to take concrete action to create a different set-up from the one in which we are unfortunately living."@en1
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