Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-01-31-Speech-3-057"
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".
Madam President, Commissioner Dimas, honourable Members, thank you very much for giving the new Presidency the opportunity to make a few comments on the subject of climate change.
We know that there will, in Germany, be more flooding, but also more recorded droughts. We, though, are a relatively wealthy and secure country. We hear about rather more serious problems when we talk to our counterparts from Spain and Portugal, countries that live in fear of real desertification, of droughts amounting to more periods of water shortages, and things become even more unsettling when we take a look and see what global warming is already doing in Africa.
On the African continent today, there are already more refugees as a result of climate change than of war and civil warfare. The sort of movements of refugees that we see on the north African coast across the Mediterranean from Europe are just a hint of what is in store for us if global warming, and the destruction of living conditions in a continent like Africa, are not stopped in their tracks.
I might also add that this has a lot to do with justice. For crying out loud, it is an injustice that it should be the continent of Africa, which bears no responsibility for the climate change that is currently going on, that should most have to suffer from the consequences of it, and that is what we are already seeing happening.
I ask you to imagine a state of affairs in which four billion of the world’s population live in industrialised societies – two-thirds of them in Asia, by the way – and global warming begins to have an effect on the glaciers of the Himalayas, the source of 40% of Asia’s fresh water. I ask you to imagine what sort of threats the world faces when these reserves of drinkable water in Asia start to disappear; we will face the prospect of wars being fought not only for oil, but also, conceivably, of wars and civil wars being fought to gain possession of reservoirs of water.
We are talking, then, about a real threat to the human race, but we must first succeed in getting these debates about the challenges to humanity out from the specialist arenas and into the forums of world leaders. In future, it will not be enough to bring together 189 environmental ministers from the United Nations and 5 000 scientists to discuss climate change at an international conference once a year; on the contrary, these issues will have to be discussed by Heads of State or Government, the UN General Assembly and the Security Council as well.
I am also a member of the German
in other words, of a parliament. We must succeed in getting these issues put high up on the agenda for parliamentary debates. I have to be frank and say that, when compared with the number of your House’s Members who turn up for debates on climate change, the number of their counterparts who do so in the
is more likely to be lower than higher.
We should also make it our business to ensure that our constantly telling the public and our constantly reading, that this is one of the greatest challenges that the human race has to contend with, actually has the effect of making us focus our political action on it and prioritising it as part of our day-to-day work.
I am convinced that the Commission’s proposals in respect of energy and climate management show not only that it has recognised this as a task, but also that it has thereby been given an historic opportunity. For the first time in the debate about energy and climate change, the Commission has made a proposal that I see as constituting an historic opportunity, in bringing together the themes of secure energy supply and the management of climate change. No longer are we debating the questions of how we are to guarantee access to energy, on the one hand, and how to safeguard our climate, on the other, in separate spheres, but instead have a package of proposals and policy instruments on the table that deals with both issues together.
We have, for the first time, the opportunity to decide issues of energy policy and climate change together, at the European level, and in a coherent concept. I know that there will, over the coming weeks and months, be much discussion in the committees, the working parties and in officials' negotiations, and you know that far better than I do, for you have more experience of European decision-making processes than I do.
My friend Mr Schulz – and it is worth the journey here just to have the chance of speaking before him, for normally our roles are reversed – knows, or at any rate he told me so earlier on, that there is always the risk of the political dynamic – what I would call the historic opportunity – being lost in amidst such discussions about details. What will, I believe, be the essential thing over the coming weeks and months will be that we do not, with all the necessary discussions of detail going on, miss this historic opportunity to combine Europe’s policies on energy and climate change and use them to map out the path for international debate to take. I see that as being the real task of the politicians in the Commission, Parliament, and in the European Council.
I would like to start by saying that we in the Council, in preparing the latest climate change conference, have arrived at common positions with the Commission and your House as regards the essential issues, strategies and responses to this global challenge. I believe that the only way we will have a chance of success over the coming years in negotiations that are currently proving difficult is if the European Union continues to speak with one voice and seeks to maintain its leadership role in the international negotiations on climate change. I am sure that the success of the past few years is accounted for by the European Union’s acceptance of this leadership role. Commissioner Dimas has just – and rightly – pointed out that the European Union, as well as having to set important goals for climate policy, does indeed face the question as to the extent to which it is prepared to give practical shape to these goals in the form of initiatives of its own and political practice at EU level and in the Member States.
There will of course be a number of points of detail where differences relating to national interests have to be settled, as is currently evident from the example of the motor industry, but what must be of the essence is that we should seize this historic opportunity, and I want, on behalf of the Council, to give a couple of examples to highlight what is going to be of particular importance at the spring summit of Heads of State or Government.
Firstly, the international negotiations need to have ambitious climate protection targets in mind; it is absolutely right that the Commission should set itself, as a goal for the international negotiations, a 30% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020, a figure arrived at not by reference to what we are confident of achieving or to what is economically feasible, but solely by reference to the reductions we have to achieve by 2020 in order to keep global warming below 2 degrees. I think that is something that has to feature more prominently in day-to-day political debate, for there is often one great problem that one has to face in the debate on climate change.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when people in my own country had problems with rubbish and waste dumps, the poisonous substances seeping out of the dumps were visible; it was because people could smell them and see them day in and day out that the politicians who dealt with day-to-day political issues got together and decided that the dumps had to be cleared up and less waste had to be added to them.
The atmosphere is a dumping ground; although, nobody sees it, one does not smell it – at least not every day – and thank heaven disasters are not a daily occurrence. There is a quite considerable likelihood of the fact of this dump’s invisibility not reminding us, on a daily basis, of the need for action, and if you tell the people, your electorate, that we want to limit the temperature increase on our planet to 2 degrees, many of them will look at you in amazement and say, ‘Two degrees? That is not really very much, and it is actually very pleasant if it does not get quite so cold in Northern Europe’. In other words, it is difficult to communicate the fact that a mere two or three degrees is the difference between our present-day temperatures and the Ice Age several thousand years ago.
And, if you then tell them that we have to get it all done by 2100, for there will by then be a lot of people on this planet, you will hear them say, in our parliaments and parties, ‘oh well, that is looking so far ahead; that is something for our successors to bother themselves about’.
It has to be spelled out that climate change is something that is already happening and that, in essence, it is our children and grandchildren who are going to be affected by it. All of those who are of my age and currently actively involved in politics will certainly be able to live out their lives on this earth, but my 18-year old daughter will pay a heavy price if we fail to make use of the next 10 to 15 years in order to bring about real change in global warming or to stop it altogether. Protecting the climate involves a long braking distance; it lasts thirty years. It is in thirty years time that we will reap the fruits of what we do properly now, but it is our children and grandchildren who will suffer the consequences of what we get wrong.
That is why it is important that we lay down the 2-degree target at the Spring Summit of Heads of State or Government, thus arriving at an international climate protection target of minus 30% by 2020.
The Commission has said that, if a multilateral agreement or an agreement supplementary to Kyoto is not reached with the United States, China and India, the European Union should set a unilateral target of at least 20%. Some political figures have said that they see that as a retrograde step in managing climate change; I see it as something quite different. The message we are sending out is that, even in the improbable eventuality of our not succeeding in bringing about an international agreement on climate change involving those beyond the EU’s borders, nobody in the EU should believe that that would be the end of climate protection; on the contrary, even in the eventuality – one that we neither expect nor desire – of international negotiations on climate change failing, our concern will be to commit the European Union to more climate protection and to achieve at least 20%, rather than contenting ourselves with 8%.
We want the agreement to apply also to air transport, and we do of course need the European motor industry’s voluntary undertaking to be put into practice. If a voluntary undertaking naming 120 grams of CO2 per kilometre on average is not forthcoming from the European motor industry, the political fallout will not be about the question of whether or not legislation is needed at the European level; rather, it seems to me, having heard what I have heard over recent days, that we – the Commission, my government, and the overwhelming majority in the Council and this House – are agreed on the fact that European legislation is needed to secure this contribution from the European motor industry, a contribution of 120 grams per kilometre.
What we will have to hammer out is whether that can be achieved through vehicle technology alone or whether we want to avail ourselves of, for example, proportionate incorporation of biofuels as a means towards that end. This is certainly, I believe, a fit subject for debate here in your House, in the Commission and at Council level, but there should be no doubt about the fact that the ultimate objective is the 120 gram target for the motor industry across the board.
Humanity faces two challenges, and they are both truly great ones. The first great challenge to the human race is the question as to how the world – and its growing population – are to be provided with sufficient energy. Today, this planet of ours is home to 6.5 billion people, and there will, at some point, be over 9 billion of them. Today, 1.4 billion people live in industrialised regions, and the population of the industrialised nations on this planet will, in a few years and decades, reach 4 billion.
Secondly, we will have to make sure that everyone makes progress towards this target – large vehicles no less than medium-sized ones or small ones, and renewable energies need to be developed to a considerable degree. Speaking both for myself and for the Council, I am very keen that we should stick with the across-the-board target of 20% of the EU’s primary energy needs being met from renewable energies, and prove that we can thereby become technological leaders. These climate change objectives are ambitious, but there are also massive prospects for the European Union’s economic growth, for job creation and for education.
After all, the question has to do with what is to become of Europe when China is the world’s workbench, Russia its petrol pump and Brazil its farmer – what will Europe be then? I believe that we in Europe will be the world’s engineers and technologists, the ones who take on the technological challenges and offer solutions whereby the issues of energy supply and climate change can be addressed, technological answers that many are waiting for the climate change talks and international energy policy to supply. It is in the region of Europe that innovation happens and Europe that possesses everything that is needed in order to provide these answers. I believe that what the Commission has put forward in matters of efficiency, climate protection targets and its energy action plan provides us with everything we need to face up to this challenge.
If, over the next fifty years, we want to consume energy and raw materials in the same way as we have done over the last half-century, we would need two planets in order to supply the human race with enough of these resources. The first question, then, that we have to answer if we want to make headway in the international negotiations on climate protection, is just how we can manage to secure the supply of energy, not only for ourselves, but also for the developing and emerging countries that are striving for economic growth in order to improve the conditions under which their people live.
If Europeans, and the other industrialised nations, do not manage to offer these countries technological answers as to how they can give their people economic growth, social security and prosperity without at the same time ruining the climate, then these countries will not join us in the search for ways of dealing with climate change.
The first challenge, then, is to answer the question that is always the first to be asked of us by the developing countries at international negotiations on climate, and it is this: ‘How, then, do we supply the people – something like two billion of them – who, at present, have no access to electricity, who live in the direst poverty, and who need energy in order to improve the conditions under which they live?’ How, then, do we organise the supply of energy to this segment of the world’s population – consisting of two billion people – without at the same time upsetting the climate?
The challenge, then, for regions like Europe, that are technologically advanced, is to find out what are the technologies of the future, that will make possible economic growth and make it independent of the ruination of the climate and from ever-increasing emissions of CO2? It is high-tech regions like Europe that will have to provide the answer.
The second – and related – challenge for the human race is how to limit climate change and global warming. This week, we will be getting our hands on the latest data from the ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’, whose scientific members are at the moment meeting in Paris to exchange data. It is already clear that what we are going to be told is that all the menacing prognostications to do with global warming are more likely to be confirmed or to turn out to be understated than that things are going to get better, and that means that we are not going to succeed in keeping global warming below 2 degrees unless we manage to do more than we have done so far in helping to reduce the output of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
It is already apparent to us what the consequences of that are. In my own country, Germany, the last glacier will have ceased to be by 2020. A few months ago, we launched a new rescue vessel to rescue people from shipwrecks in the North Sea. It is almost 50 metres in length. Ten or 20 years ago, a length of between 20 and 30 metres would have been quite sufficient. These are the first indications of climate change in a country that is affected by it only to a relatively small extent."@en1
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