Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-01-Speech-1-092"
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"en.20011001.6.1-092"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, this very long title essentially covers machines with which we are all familiar, such as lawn mowers, chain saws, hedge trimmers, drills, all of which are mobile and to which environmental legislation has perhaps given too little attention in recent years. We know, for example, that nowadays a four-stroke lawn mower emits exactly as much in an hour as a car in European category 4 travelling at 150 kilometres per hour. Or we know that, on some days in June this year, 40% of carbon monoxide emissions originated from these mobile machines, 40% of the ozone precursors. That is why we have to do something about this.
The proposed directive is all right in so far as it goes, but we made a number of critical observations in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy. One point was that we wanted to move the timetable forward a bit, in much the same way as legislation in the United States takes place. We wanted to see if the 'averaging and banking' model was perhaps after all unjustifiable in European terms, being something of a bureaucratic monster that would be hard to keep a check on in Europe and which, to that extent, would tell us little about whether we could achieve the reductions we were aiming for. We tackled this issue very ambitiously in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy. As the decision was made in July – in other words, quite some time ago – we were able to negotiate with the Council about this legislation.
I can now present a compromise package which the Council is prepared to accept by a large majority, if not unanimously. It is my opinion that we should in this case go down this route and complete the legislation in its entirety in one reading. On the one hand, that would help take the burden off the bureaucratic processes here in the European Parliament and in the Council, and on the other would also, of course, help the environment if the legislation could enter into force more quickly.
What is this compromise about? Firstly, we want to move the date of entry into force forward for certain categories. It is about midway between what was decided by the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy and what was proposed by the Commission.
Secondly, we want to dispense with the 'averaging and banking' system because of the bureaucratic difficulties involved in it. In order, however, that environmental legislation should not produce distortions in competition which are not justified in terms of environmental policy, we want to make exceptions possible for small manufacturers producing 25 000 units per annum, and we also want certain products, the SH2 and SH3 machines, to be subject to transitional rules for a period of five years, for example certain chain saws used high up in trees or certain two-stroke motors that drive drills. That is contained in Amendment No 30, so that these machines can be granted extra time – something which, incidentally, corresponds to what industry too has suggested. I cannot therefore go down the road of excluding certain machines from the directive altogether, but I will say: let us give these machines more time if this is justified on technical grounds.
I would again remind you how, when we were very ambitious in legislating for cars in categories 3 and 4, we ended up in the Conciliation Committee reaching a reasonable compromise which, of course, met with little approval from the industry at first but which in the final analysis is now appreciated by everybody, because it improves air quality in Europe. I think that the compromise package that I am able to present to you today points in the same direction, the only difference being that it is on the table already and not only after a conciliation procedure. In this respect, what lies before us on the table today is not a ‘chain saw massacre’, which one newspaper called it but, rather, a durable compromise to improve air quality in Europe."@en1
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