Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-10-Speech-4-044"
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"en.20080410.4.4-044"2
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"Mr President, well, we are supposed to stay cool when following a debate, but this debate has got out of hand and it has literally gone with the wind, and with it has gone honesty and rationalism. We are supposed to be honest, but painting a gloomy picture has always been politically very good. It has always paid off. But we are supposed to be serious and we have to look at the figures and remain rational and honest.
People can live in Helsinki, with its average annual temperature of 6°C, or they can live in Dakar in 30°C. Two thousand years ago, Julius Caesar was walking on the Rhine because it was frozen over. One thousand years ago, the Vikings were in Greenland – that is why it is called Greenland. Therefore, temperature is not an end in itself, but the prosperity of people is an end in itself and that is what we forget.
Why do we have emissions? That is the result of prosperity, and two thirds of people in the world still live in poverty. The human family is arranged as in a staircase: we, the privileged ones, are at the top, and there are four billion people below us who, literally, want to come into the daylight, because two billion people do not even have electricity.
So what is our answer? Our answer is to improve our technology. For that we need money and we need our economy to grow. We cannot have money if we are wasting and damaging our economy by applying measures that are counterproductive and very costly.
The Commissioner did not even mention the key word ‘nuclear’ in his opening remarks. If we are not honest in this debate, then we are not serious leaders. To sum up, we are a little bit like the man whose roof is leaking, but instead of fixing it he starts to wallpaper his cellar. Well, that is not how to build our future."@en1
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