Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-01-31-Speech-3-106"
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"en.20070131.19.3-106"2
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Mr President, honourable Members, there are just a few points on which I would like to enlarge. Many of you have said that we have been talking about climate change for many years without anything actually having happened, but I would ask that we should not underestimate what the Commission has come up with over the last few weeks and not make it out to be less than it is.
Perhaps I might add that, if you want to make yourself less dependent on oil and gas imports in order to have motor vehicles emitting less in the way of CO2, you will hardly be able to offer nuclear power as an alternative unless we in Europe can agree to drive only electric cars. I do not exactly see that happening any time soon. That is why concentrating on renewable energies, as the Commission proposes, is very definitely the right way to go. That will of course have to involve a burden-sharing arrangement, with every country in Europe having to take on a certain percentage and thus make it possible for the 20% target for primary energy consumption to be achieved by 2020.
Let me conclude by mentioning two areas in which we are a long way away from achieving any real breakthrough. Many of you have pointed to the emerging economies of such countries as China, India and Brazil – set to produce a great deal of emissions in the future – and argued that we need to get them on board where the reduction of CO2 is concerned, by means of undertakings that may well be voluntary, but better still mandatory, and you are right to do so, but we will not be able to do that in the absence of technological solutions that we can offer them as a means towards growth.
Whether the European Union opts for 30, 20, 40 or 10 per cent is completely irrelevant; the only way we will have a chance of getting these countries on board is to offer them technologies that they can use to provide themselves with energy, that will guarantee them growth while not, at the same time, damaging the climate in the way it hitherto has been in the industrialised nations, and we are a long way away from doing that. Despite the good initiative from the
despite the willingness to transfer technology by way of ‘clean development mechanism’ projects under the Kyoto Protocol, that which is on offer is far from enough.
I would therefore say that, if you want to find out just how differently the European Union and the developing countries think about these things, you should go and participate in international talks from time to time.
When we start talking about how to deal with climate change, our opposite numbers in the developing countries take that to mean that their former colonial masters are coming along and trying to inhibit their economic development. When we go to Brazil and talk about how to protect the rainforest – one object of that being to stop putting so much CO2 into the atmosphere, and another being to maintain the forest’s natural capacity for absorbing it – the answer we get from officials is ‘you have not yet got used to the idea that these are our rainforests; it is we who decide what happens to them, and not the old colonial states in Europe, who are again trying to tell us what to do’. That is how far we actually are from any sort of common understanding of what protecting the climate is about, and common ground on this point is very difficult to achieve.
A number of you have said that we need to practise self-denial; I presume that they mean that the people of Europe have to deny themselves prosperity and other things. I do not think that they need to do that, yet all the same, we, in the industrialised states, must declare ourselves willing to return some of the benefits we have gained over the past few hundred years from our former colonies, some of the wealth we have accumulated at the cost of their poverty, to those states, not least in order to give them answers to their questions as to how they can drive forward their own economic and social development without damaging the climate.
That is the sort of self-denial we are talking about – not the renunciation of prosperity for ourselves, but abandoning the idea that all the wealth we in Europe and in other industrialised states have worked to create should be kept by us for us alone.
We will have to make some of this wealth available in order to fund technological developments and technology transfers, along with the things that need to be done to adapt to the climate change that is already happening. That is the second thing that the developing countries demand of the industrialised nations; before they become willing to talk with us about limiting their CO2 output while still pursuing growth, they want to see us showing ourselves willing to repair the damage already done in them by climate change and to help them to adapt to it.
We now possess a fund intended to be valued at EUR 300 million – perhaps more – by 2012, with the intention of funding adaptation measures around the world. Is there anyone in this Chamber who actually believes that EUR 300 million will really be enough to get the world as a whole adjusted to climate change? That amount is approximately equivalent to the budgets of two medium-sized towns in my own country, and it is far from being enough.
Those are the two questions that are put to us. We are not being asked whether we, in Europe, are willing to make cutbacks of 20%, 30% or 40%; we are being asked what we are doing to facilitate real transfers of technology to their countries in order to enable them to achieve growth while at the same time avoiding doing harm to the climate, and, secondly, what we are doing to fund adaptation in those countries to the climate change for which we are responsible. Those are the answers we have to give if we want to get China, Brazil and India – who will account for so much future output – on our side.
That the Commission should, for the first time, have devised a joint strategy for securing energy supply and protecting against climate change is something I see as constituting a unique opportunity, and I would point out that, while we have, in the past, as a rule, discussed these two things separately, we now have a joint strategy.
Like Commissioner Dimas, I am convinced that America will sign up to an agreement that works; whether that agreement is called Kyoto or something else remains to be seen, but what the USA will do is participate in a functioning market, in a functioning emissions trading system, and in climate protection schemes that actually work.
For as long as no answers to these questions are forthcoming from us, the Americans – no matter who is in power there – will find it easy not to sign up to binding undertakings.
I would like to make a second comment in response to the Austrian Member who said, ‘Well roared, lion!’, and to Mrs Harms, who said, ‘enough words have been bandied back and forth, now is the time for some action.’ I believe that nothing like enough has yet been said, and if Mrs Harms wants evidence of that, she only needs to look around this Chamber or at the
back home in Germany.
If we are convinced that climate change really is a challenge to the human race, why, then, can we not, in the national parliaments, get those Members who speak up in debates about health service reform, the labour market, foreign policy and peacemaking, to get worked up about climate change?
Why, then, have we not managed to get the Members who were in this Chamber earlier to vote to stay here and take part in this debate, to get angry about what the Commission or the Council say, to come up with their own proposals, to express their agreement or disagreement, to make criticisms or contribute to debate?
We are far from having engaged the voting public to the degree to which we should have done, for if we had, there would be unanimity on these various issues in the Member States. Let us then be careful with assertions about there having been enough talking; I believe we still have some way to go before we have convinced those who need to be won over if difficult decisions are to get majority backing. It is not enough to convince the environmental policy experts, and, indeed, some of them in our Member States have yet to be won over. I am not particularly inclined to tell other people what they have to do; we have quite enough to do in my own country, and I suspect that I am not alone in thinking this.
Turning to Mrs Harms among others, let me ask this: just what were the most important proposals that you criticised earlier? The first package dealt with energy efficiency. It is not just a case of the European Union being able, given increased energy efficiency by 2020, to save EUR 100 billion that are urgently needed for consumers, for investments in research, development and other things that are on our agenda, for increasing energy efficiency by 20% means that we are spared 780 million tonnes of CO2 – double the amount we wanted to save in Europe under the Kyoto Protocol.
Energy efficiency does not often lend itself so well to big ideological and political debates as, for example nuclear power. Energy efficiency is often about many small issues that one has to monitor, keep an eye on, and keep on moving forward, but it does offer the greatest opportunities not only for secure energy supply but also for climate protection.
I regard the Commission’s proposals on this subject as an excellent package, and would be glad if we – quite apart from all the great banner headlines – were to give at least as much thought to the issue of how we can actually implement the many individual programmes contained in this package, both as a matter of Community policy and in the policies of the Member States.
Secondly, the motor industry’s 120 grams of CO2 emitted per kilometre are of course part of the theme of greater energy efficiency, but, returning to your earlier question as to how it is to be ensured that a proportionate amount of biofuel is also taken into account, I can say that we are together putting the case for Europe’s oil industry to move on from the present proportion of 5.75% biofuels to be mixed in, to a substantially greater percentage. The Commission is proposing 10%, and some Member States see an even higher percentage as feasible. As I see it, 12.5% or 15% ought not to be beyond the bounds of possibility as an effective means of ensuring that, in the European Union, no oil gets on to the market and into the petrol pumps unless it contains a specified proportion of biofuels.
I see that as an absolute necessity, firstly in order, in this area too, to make us less dependent on oil and gas imports, secondly to ensure that we become less affected by international price increases, and thirdly, in order to make the most important contribution to reducing the output of CO2 as a result of the fuels we consume.
The second major area is, of course, that of renewable energies, so can we please not act as if it were already self-evident in the European Union that all Member States would accept as a single goal what the Commission is proposing, namely that primary energy consumption in Europe should be 20% renewable? There is a long road to travel before we get that far. What I would ask your House to do is to help us and the Commission get a majority for this target at the spring summit of the Heads of State or Government, for I regard it as one of the most important that we have to achieve.
Mrs Grossetête, who had asked me for an answer on the subject of nuclear power, is unfortunately no longer in the Chamber, so perhaps you would tell her from me that, if nuclear power accounts for 15% of Europe’s end-user energy consumption, it makes little sense to concentrate only on that 15%, for, if we did that, 85% would be unaffected."@en1
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