Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-14-Speech-3-057"
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"en.20070314.4.3-057"2
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"Mr President, the decisions of the Council were ambitious and the unanimity quite remarkable. The devil is going to be in the detail and I suspect there will not be anything like so much agreement when the burden-sharing proposals are announced, and some of the specific targets are open to challenge, not least by environmentalists.
The biofuels target, for example, has got to be a mistake when there is so much evidence that it makes better use to use biocrops in generating electricity than in powering cars. Let us not pretend that our demand for biofuels is not going to have an effect on tropical rainforests. We cannot even prevent the import into this country of illegally cropped wood, let alone stop the expansion of palm oil plantations. It is going to have an effect and I hope that all the energy proposals in this package will be put through the codecision procedure to ensure that parliamentarians have a chance to influence them in some way.
Carping aside, the overall direction is good and the objectives are noble. The European Union has taken on the mantle here of an evangelist seeking to alert the rest of the world to the dangers of climate change and to bring about a post-2012 international agreement involving at the very least China, India and the United States.
At the latest we have to try to forge this post-2012 agreement by the Conference of Parties in 2009, and quite a transformation in attitudes in these other countries is going to be needed if we are to achieve that. We are going to have to try and influence every opinion-former, the media, every parliamentarian, business leaders as well as government ministers if that is to be secured. I do not believe these resources exist, certainly not in DG Environment, perhaps not in the entire Commission. They do exist in Europe, however, if we pool our resources across all 27 Member States, our diplomats and our politicians and our businesses in a concerted campaign to change minds and secure success.
We should think of it like this and try and put it in these dramatic terms to concentrate the mind. We have less than 1000 days in which to save the world and secure an international agreement of this kind. That is our task and it is going to need all our resources. We need to build on the Council’s decision and inject a sense of zeal, passion and urgency into our work, if it is to be achieved."@en1
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