Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-01-31-Speech-3-060"
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"en.20070131.16.3-060"2
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"Madam President, my group welcomes the Commission’s recent focus on energy policy and climate change, its biomass proposal of December 2005, its proposals concerning the ‘standby’ mode for electronic equipment of September 2006, its energy policy this month and today’s announcement of a fuel quality directive. We feel that together these represent an ambitious but not unachievable policy. Such a policy is essential if the Union and its Member States are to live up to their responsibility to citizens, if we are to enjoy secure energy supplies and if we are to persuade other countries to follow our example.
HG Wells said ‘human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe’. If the Commission grasps this agenda, if it challenges the Member States rather than deferring to them, then there is hope that the Union will yet command greater support among our citizens.
If we had heeded the warnings of Californian scientists in the late 1970s, we could probably have prevented climate change. Now we can hope only to contain it. For that reason, Liberals and Democrats deplore the pleadings of German car manufacturers in
and the attempts by some Commissioners to water down emissions targets.
If the Japanese can make hybrid cars, if the French and the Italians can produce cars that are far more efficient, why cannot others as well?
I do not often quote Konrad Adenauer in this House – I leave that to my colleagues on the right – but Adenauer was pertinent when he said ‘God placed limits on man’s reason. But not on his stupidity’.
We will not succeed unless our citizens recognise there is a problem and start changing their habits. Do we really need electric razors or electric curling irons? Do we really need cars that go from 0 to 100 km per hour in less than six seconds if it will destroy our planet in less than six decades? There is a boast of car manufacturers that their cars do 240 km per hour. That may be so, but they emit 360g of CO2 for each kilometre. Stopping this is not hitting jobs. A Belgian Government study last year showed that cutting CO2 emissions has no overall effect on jobs, because there are new high-tech sectors which create new jobs.
It is not just on climate issues where new thinking is needed: we need to feed a rapidly growing world population and bring living standards up to the point where population numbers stabilise. There are many ways to do that – growing soya, for example, with the same nutritional value as beef for less than 1% of the inputs.
Democracy can no longer be run by crisis management, where serious problems are left untackled until there is a crisis. Where livelihoods and the sustainability of life are at stake, we need a purposeful, proactive approach to our politics, such as that suggested by the President-in-Office today. It is not easy to change people’s habits. There is not enough emphasis in the Commission’s proposals on cutting energy use, but it is essential."@en1
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