Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-01-17-Speech-2-158"
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"en.20060117.19.2-158"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, Mr Bartenstein, I would like to start with Ukraine, having been rather surprised that the gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine, which is an annual event nearly caused us in Europe to treat it as a European gas crisis. Ukraine, and later Moldova, found themselves in a situation that had been brought to the point of crisis, but Europe did not. Europe was able, as it has been before, to rely on stable trading relations with Russia. As I see it, what this situation has shown us was that we in the European Union cannot regard Ukraine as nothing more than a safe transit country, but must rather, by means of energy policy, help it to free itself from dependence on Russia and thereby improve its prospects for the future. A great deal of change is needed here.
Quite apart from that, I see this whole debate as an object lesson in the weaknesses of European energy policy, which are more or less marked from one Member State to another. A coordinated approach could, without a doubt, help to improve the situation in the Member States and across Europe. We have now learned the real value of natural resources. It has to be said that we right across Europe, are, to say the least, wasteful in our use of gas, and of oil too, and this was the subject of more vigorous debate at the time of the Iraq war. For some considerable time, our squandering of these raw materials has been something we have not been able to get away with. If we want to learn the right lessons from this, then we must, I believe, be much more consistent in doing as Commissioner Piebalgs suggested at the time he took office. We have to pursue natural resource productivity and energy efficiency if we are to be less dependent on others; I would be dead against striving for a fully self-sufficient Europe, which would be a naive approach in terms of the overall debate, but we do have to work towards a Europe that makes adequate use of raw materials. This is something we have been talking about for decades, for as long as there has been a Club of Rome, so let us at last come up with something of some practical use. Let those who think that the use of nuclear power is the right response to the reduced – or indeed finite – supply of gas, just for once put forward a serious case for their chosen approach; how many reactors do they want to build over the next few years, and where? What do they propose to do with the waste that has been produced in Europe for decades? A few weeks ago, we debated the report on the decommissioning of power reactors. Right now, the whole business of nuclear waste disposal is a disaster area. If that is to be the shape of the future, then I urge them to make their case in clearer terms, but please can they spare us a debate on lifetime extension of the sort that is resuming even on the subject of the reactor at Ignalina? If you really do want to do no more than extend the working life of superannuated technology, then you are increasing the risks inherent in energy production rather than delivering us from them."@en1
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