Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-11-16-Speech-2-067"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.19991116.5.2-067"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
"The most vital requirement of energy and environmental policy as we approach the millennium is to meet our Kyoto commitments, and here of course a CO2 tax would have a major role to play. Unfortunately, that has not yet been agreed, but we would ask the Commission to proceed in this direction.
We are not in fact meeting our energy commitments under Kyoto at all. Energy conservation, rational planning and renewable energies are agreed to be the most important way forward other than the CO2 tax, about which, as I have said, no agreement has yet been reached. They are indeed the right way to sustainability, but we are not pursuing them strongly enough. The most recent statistics on energy intensity show that for 1996 we are at level zero. We are in fact going backwards after seven years of trying to meet climate change commitments: this is not only unacceptable, it is completely scandalous. I would refer you to those statistics – I am sure you know what they are, and we have to do better. Our citizens expect and, indeed, demand that we do better.
The Commission and Parliament have indeed together sought to keep the already small budget for SAVE and ALTENER on target and for that I thank you and I hope we can continue to make progress.
What does not have a place in energy and the environment is nuclear power because it is not sustainable. We do not have the ability to deal with nuclear waste although various fancy solutions have been proposed, including sending it to the moon, and we would be indeed on another planet if we agreed with Mr Chichester that nuclear power was a solution. It is not, and I think that he was very ill-advised to add this discordant note to an otherwise more or less acceptable report. I also feel that the Commission was most wise to avoid reference to nuclear power in its own proposals and I would advise you to keep to this approach because it is a most divisive thing to propose, and we will certainly not agree to it.
The recent nuclear accident in Japan has exposed once again the criminal negligence of the nuclear industry, and the recent falsifications of safety checks by BNFL at Sellafield are further evidence that we need to have great anxiety about the nuclear industry and how it operates. What do we want, and what is the way forward? We want the implementation of commitments in the White Paper on renewable energies, for example. We want these commitments fleshed out by a Commission action plan on renewable energies. Reference has been made to the internal market, and this is the most important environment in which we now operate: here the large subsidies for coal and nuclear energy must be ended and support for renewables as an important aspect of environmental policy must be made realistic. Legally-binding targets for renewable energies are an important part of this strategy, but we must also have very clearly the externalisation of internal costs in respect of traditional energy production. Finally, I think that if we have a level playing field and if we end the subsidies particularly for nuclear energy, we will see the other forms of energy coming forward."@en1
|
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples