Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-02-15-Speech-2-704-000"
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"en.20110215.33.2-704-000"2
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"Mr President, today, 1.5 billion people are currently without access to electricity, but access to energy is a prerequisite for the eradication of the poverty that these people live in. The right to energy implies that energy supplies achieve universal and reliable access: equitable access that bridges the gap between urban and rural areas and is also affordable. It is also crucial for a country to develop a sustainable and secure energy supply, and the most reliable and secure one is a decentralised use of renewables.
But energy does not only need to be secure and reliable; its production also needs to take into account other issues such as climate change, deforestation, environmental degradation, human health, and the poverty it causes. These problems cannot be tackled by fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have a disastrous impact on health, environment and climate. At the same time, the climate crisis is doing more damage to those living in extreme poverty. Fossil fuels create pollution that endangers both human health and a healthy environment, and they are expensive and their prices increase the more we run out of oil and gas. Fossil fuels create centralised, hierarchic and inflexible energy distribution.
We have to focus on renewables. We have to assist developing countries to leapfrog our destructive fossil fuel path. Only renewables can bring a solution to these problems. Renewable energy uses resources that will never run out and that many developing countries have in abundance: sun and wind mainly. They can be employed locally on a very small and inexpensive scale, which is also, in a very literal sense, empowering people. Decentralised power supplies are in the hands of the people. They are democratic. Nevertheless, the World Bank continues to push fossils in its energy strategy. Recent increases in lending for renewable and energy sufficiency remain tiny and cannot cover up the obvious preferences.
Fossil fuel investments are also taking place through financial intermediaries which the World Bank does not sufficiently monitor. There is an under-reporting of fossil fuels. The bank continues to make significant investment in coal-fired power plants, locking developing countries into coal-based energy for decades to come. This is not what an energy revolution looks like.
The World Bank’s energy policy suffers from a lack of transparency. This problem should be addressed through the definition of clear requirements that financial intermediaries must meet in order to be eligible for multilateral financing. 40% of World Bank loans to the private sector are transferred through those financial intermediaries and a large part of those loans goes to the energy sector, in particular, extractives. However, unlike direct bank project investments, there is no information publicly available on these individual sub-project investments, making it very difficult to track what ultimately happens to financial intermediaries’ funding.
When we look at what sort of energy is counted as low carbon, we can find large hydropower plants in the strategy. Such large hydroplants destroy vast amounts of nature and drive people from their homes. This is not sustainable and this is not in the interests of the people and of society. Also, carbon capture and storage do not make coal power low carbon. The CO
is still there and nobody can predict what will happen to it underground. None of us can say for sure that it will stay there, calmly for the next millennia. This is fortune telling and not research, and certainly not policy making.
The same goes for nuclear energy. Uranium mining produces huge amounts of CO
and nobody knows what to do with the waste we are producing. This is not low carbon and this is not sustainable. This is why the Green/EFA Group will vote against the resolution unless the low carbon wording is replaced.
However, we also see some good points in the resolution: for example, the focus on off-grid renewables for rural areas and small-scale local production, as well as the concern about the dominance of export orientation, large-scale plants and bio fuels.
A last word: we also very much focus on the call for enhanced technology transfer. In particular, technology transfer will not need much if intellectual property rights are left intact. The overriding goal should be to treat intellectual property rights in a manner that allows access to technology at affordable prices. This is what we promised at the climate negotiations, and we should stick to our promise."@en1
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