Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-18-Speech-4-058"
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"en.20010118.3.4-058"2
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"Mr President, I would like to thank the Commission and Mr Seppänen, who produced the draft report. As a member of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy, I am especially encouraged by how the report has managed to take account of ecological and even partly socio-economic conditions in the industry, active, as it is, in the market.
I myself wish to raise the issue of peat, which is dealt with in the second paragraph of the report. The report calls for the inclusion of the peat industry in the forest cluster. This is most justified. It will support many aims of the energy policy which the EU is trying to drive through, and which it has just mentioned in the Green Paper on energy. Peat will reinforce the situation regarding our self-sufficiency in energy and its guaranteed supply, which, alarmingly, are in decline; and it will promote the combined production of electricity and heat, and bring with it the synergic benefit of the use of wood and peat for energy. Given that peat growth is on a year-to-year basis, it is clearly also a renewable energy source. Moreover, peat has many regionally positive effects that favour employment.
On the whole, peat should be compared to wood rather than carbon, for example, which is now how it is classed by the EU, going against what is factually correct. The renewability of peat is an incontestable biological fact. Peat grows continually through the assimilation of bog plants and the production of forest litter. Its origin is in principle exactly the same as that of other biomasses that derive from plants, for example wood. The time necessary for the process is longer, however. According to a new, impartial scientific report, peat should be distinguished from fossil fuels, which take millions of years to form. Owing to its origin and essentially renewable nature, peat must be classified as a biomass fuel, but because it regrows substantially more slowly than other plants, a new, third category should be established and placed between fossil fuels and energy sources whose renewability rate is fast. Peat is a biomass fuel with a slow renewability rate.
It is undeniable that burning peat, as with wood fuel, produces greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. The Kyoto agreement does not include emissions from burning wood in the overall emissions burden, as the carbon that is sequestered in wood would be released in any case when the wood decays. Furthermore, studies on carbon levels and gas circulation in peatlands have come out in recent years and their results show it would be desirable to have a re-evaluation of peat fuel emissions which took account of gas levels in bogs as a whole.
When we speak of peat it is worth reminding ourselves of scale. The area devoted to energy use is very small compared to the areas of marshland used in forestry and agriculture. The peat harvest accounts for less than one per mil of the total area of northern peatlands. Nevertheless, the economic exploitation of peat is important in those areas where there is a lot of marshland. For example, in Finland we use less than half the annual growth of peat each year. We therefore do not touch the capital, because the interest is enough to get by on.
The report urges the Commission to strengthen the coordination and coherence of Community sectorial action having an impact on forest clusters, in order to improve competitiveness. This need for coordination and coherence would in particular appear to apply to peat, and one important step on the road would be to change the way it is classified and its status, to correspond with its true nature."@en1
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