Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-25-Speech-3-264"

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"en.20001025.11.3-264"2
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"Mr President, I am glad to hear that the Commissioner is pressing for eight Members of this House to attend COP6, but I want to emphasise that we want to play a constructive role in EU strategy making. We do not want to be squeezed out as Members were who attended the World Health Organisation conference recently. We see ourselves working together at a set of European institutions fighting to improve the situation and ensure that the Kyoto Protocol is ratified. Compare, after all, our common agreement with the experience we had just recently at that tele-conferencing session with members of the US Congress, which frankly was a very depressing experience. The chairman of the Health Science Committee spelt out, from the American point of view, that this was an economic issue, not an environmental one. That really spells out the differences between the approach of the United States representatives and those of this Parliament. There was no recognition of the need to make sacrifices or to accept that we have historic responsibilities on both sides of the Atlantic as the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. For all our good intentions, however, it looks as though in the European Union far from cutting CO2 emissions by the end of this decade we shall end up increasing them. So the prospects for COP6 look poor, but the prospects of our meeting our goals even with Kyoto do not look that good either. That is not helped by governments across the European Union responding to calls to cut fuel prices. If we are serious about the environment, these must be resisted. We should not be cutting fuel tax. I say "yes" to emissions trading – let us get on with it. Let us also hurry up with the measures we need to take in each Member State cutting traffic emissions, increasing energy efficiency, promoting renewables and CHP. The sad truth is we will not succeed in preventing climate change anyway, but if we do not start taking action now, the problems will become all the worse."@en1
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