Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-10-07-Speech-1-054-000"
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"en.20131007.14.1-054-000"2
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"One thousand years ago the King of England was from Denmark. And although he reigned for some two decades, most – young people anyway – would remember him from the story of his trying to demonstrate the limitations of a king’s power by trying to curb the incoming sea. And I have often thought how much more successful he might have been in demonstrating the point if the tide had been going out rather than coming in.
And sometimes I think of our Danish Commissioner and think that she might have had a more satisfactory period in office if the tide had been with her rather than against her. Because it seems to me that the high-water mark for dealing with climate change in this Parliament, and in the European Union, was towards the end of 2007, and that since then we have been trying to cling on to our ambitions and finding it more and more difficult to see them implemented.
Of course we have the background of the financial crisis and of growing unemployment, concern about jobs going overseas, and above all the lack of a global agreement – the sense of ‘Why should we go it alone if the world is not playing fair with us?’.
And now we come to the point where the Committee on the Environment, of all bodies, cannot even agree on a report on this issue. And for what reason? As Mr Seeber said: because some PPE Members, or all PPE Members, did not like the 25 % target. But we had already agreed on the 25 % target when we dealt with the low-carbon roadmap and it has often been said by the Commissioner that we are probably on target to reach 25 % anyway, without additional measures.
So we seem to have got ourselves locked into a position where there is conflict for no good reason. Environmentalists look to the Committee on Industry and perhaps the EPP and treat them with suspicion, and too many members of the Committee on Industry look at the Committee on the Environment in the same way – and the common ground just disappears.
However, I hear many members of the EPP, many members of the Committee on Industry, saying that we have to tackle the problem of global warming. We have to deal with CO2 emissions and there has got to be common ground here. I want to see businesses succeed. We all want to see European businesses succeed. There have got to be more opportunities for ensuring that business can succeed and can go down the route of a low-carbon future and can survive in an increasingly competitive world. But we have got to bridge these gaps.
So for my part Mr President, I am making an undertaking here; I am going to work more closely with my EPP colleagues and my Committee on Industry colleagues. I am going to listen more closely to their arguments and I am going to try and frame the way in which I respond in accord with their views. But together I hope we can put business and the environment together and go forward in a united fashion."@en1
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