Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-24-Speech-2-515"
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"en.20090324.38.2-515"2
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"Madam President, the regulation before us is the natural continuation and an important part of the Montreal Protocol, which obliges its 191 signatory states actively to abandon the use of substances that deplete the ozone layer.
The Montreal Protocol is considered to be one of the most successful of all international environmental agreements. The results speak for themselves. There has been a 95% reduction in consumption of ODS compared with the baselines set. Furthermore, greenhouse gas emissions will have been avoided over a 20-year period that are equivalent to more than 100 billion tonnes of CO
. That is why the regulation we are now considering will not just promote the recovery of the ozone layer: it is also an important part of the fight against climate change.
The previous regulation, drafted nine years ago, was hopelessly behind the times, and it was necessary to bring it up to date. The simplification of the current regulation’s structure, the deletion of obsolete provisions and extending the obligation to file reports to cover new substances are reforms that were sorely needed. I would like to congratulate my colleague, Mr Blokland, very warmly on his work as Parliament’s rapporteur. The compromise at first reading, though challenging democratically, is a sensible solution for an update such as this one, and reaching it was in itself an environmental accomplishment.
The now acceptable regulation will bring current Community regulations more appropriately in line with the original provisions of the Montreal Protocol. For example, bringing forward the deadline for ending the production of HCFCs by five years to 2020 is sensible and justified, as is reducing the number of exemptions to the ban on export trade. As the aims of this regulation cannot be satisfactorily achieved in our Community just through action on the part of the Member States, we need to address the problem globally, in the context of the global economy. If there were too many exceptions to the exports ban, it would be too difficult to show they were justifiable.
The Montreal Protocol itself has had additions made to it no less than four times. The 20-year-old treaty was amended in this way in London, Copenhagen, Montreal and Beijing. It is not just a success story: it is also a story of the necessity to correct mistaken trends as understanding increases. It is this same wisdom that we now need in the case of the Kyoto Protocol.
The original Montreal Protocol focused on the protection of the ozone layer, mainly by restricting CFCs, and that goal was quickly tightened up almost to zero. So CFCs started to be replaced with HCFCs, for example, which were a lot less harmful to the ozone layer. As is often the way with solutions to environmental problems, however, another aspect to the problem emerged. HCFCs, or fluorinated gases, proved to be particularly harmful on account of their huge Global Warming Potential or GWP. Some of them are more than a thousand times more intense as global warmers than carbon dioxide. It thus became necessary to amend the weak points in the treaty.
We need to be able to learn a lesson in the same way in the case of the Kyoto Treaty. It has to be admitted that it is not at all effective as it stands. It will not cut global emissions and will not even reduce carbon intensiveness. Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that those who were responsible for drafting the Kyoto Treaty assumed that the problem of carbon dioxide could be solved in the same way that applies to freons.
Climate change is an environmental problem on a totally different scale from earlier problems. Whereas ozone depletion concerned problems that were generated by the by-products of industrial or energy production, the cause of climate change lies in something that sustains the entire global economy and global production. The world still runs on carbon. That is why climate change must be seen above all as a problem of industrial engineering. The focus of decisions needs to switch from restricting emissions to a comprehensive reorganisation of energy and material production systems. Let us learn a lesson from Montreal."@en1
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