Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-10-22-Speech-1-147"
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"en.20071022.16.1-147"2
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".
Ladies and gentlemen, Madam President, Commissioner, this is a matter of urgency, as we all know. Al Gore, who rang the alarm bell, has been awarded the Nobel Prize, and it is time for the European Union to stop talking and to act, because this is not a new issue. There was a voluntary agreement entered into by car manufacturers to achieve average emissions of 140g of CO
per kilometre by 2008, and that agreement was not kept. I would remind you that the European Parliament itself fixed the target of 120g by 2005 or 2010 at the latest. There is no justification today for backing away from those targets. So what we need is an ambitious, unambiguous and binding directive and it needs to set targets in two stages.
First, in the short term, we need a target of 120g of CO
for new cars and a 10g reduction to be achieved through complementary measures. We need to move swiftly, however, and we therefore support the vote in the Committee on the Environment for the target to be achieved in 2012, with binding steps from 2009 onwards so that by 2012 the target will be met in full for all vehicles.
As the second stage, we believe it is essential to set targets of 95g for 2020 and 70g for 2025, with an intermediary deadline in 2016 to ensure that we are on track. We therefore support the ambitious roadmap prepared by the Committee on the Environment because we think it succeeds in setting clearly visible standards, while at the same time confronting us with the technology gap that we need to overcome in order to meet our Kyoto Protocol commitments. Yes, of course, it is going to be expensive and there will have to be negotiation about the price of new vehicles. The first thing to note is that not all cars and not all manufacturers achieved the same effectiveness under the voluntary agreement.
Yes, we do need to favour small cars over large cars and we need to come up with tax measures, new practices and even bans in some cases, particularly in built-up areas, to prevent large vehicles, including 4x4s, from polluting our towns and cities all day long and producing huge quantities of CO
. This question is particularly important because the bigger the vehicles that manufacturers produce, the bigger their profit margins. We therefore need to guide the market in such a way that manufacturers producing smaller, less polluting vehicles can be more profitable than those producing big high-polluting cars and, as well as setting standards, we expect the Commission to propose strategies for moving in that direction.
The last point I should like to stress is the importance of proper information for vehicle purchasers to help them pick their way through this minefield, and specifically we need to get rid of misleading advertising. That is why my group has tabled an amendment requiring a labelling system for all cars, based on an A-G format for energy efficiency, so that all consumers can make an active choice in favour of the environment."@en1
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