Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-10-Speech-1-060"
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"en.20050110.12.1-060"2
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"Over the last two weeks
the South-East Asia disaster has had a great effect on the world. The causes of the tsunami and of global climate change are not linked, of course, unless we measure time in millions of years, and consider continental drift, which does indeed result in earthquakes and in climate change. Timescales of millions of years, however, are imperceptible to human beings, and discussions about them are therefore of little use to politicians. 2004 provided a multitude of new signs of accelerating global warming: the unexpectedly rapid melting of Greenland’s glaciers, which will raise the level of the oceans by seven metres in all, to mention just one. Last September, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair devoted one of his speeches to global climate change. In it, he stated that by 2100 the level of the ocean would rise by 88 cm, which, given today’s demographic situation, would pose a threat to a hundred million people. That is a very different order of magnitude from the number of victims of the recent tsunami. The amount of time we have to prepare, however, is different as well – instead of two hours, we still have almost a century. Nevertheless, 10% of the time we had, if we start counting from the Rio Conference, has already been spent, and not in the most constructive manner.
I have to admit that I participated in the Rio Conference, and that in my previous life as a historical climatologist I reconstructed the time series of Tallinn harbour freeze-ups back to 1500. Tallinn is located in a sensitive part of the Baltic Sea where every year the sea is faced with the Hamletic question: “To be or not to be – frozen?” From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, there were six to eight completely ice-free winters per century. In the twentieth century, mainly from the 70s onwards, there were 16 ice-free winters, and in the new millennium, four out of five winters have been ice-free. It is paradoxically sad that several successive Estonian governments have sat in a house with a superb view of the Bay of Tallinn, but have not noticed this essential climate change indicator, or have been unable to draw any inferences relating to energy policy from it. The management of Estonia’s national power generation company, inspired by the example of US oil and coal monopolies, is still being conducted in the spirit of the period of peak industrialisation of 50 years ago. The water use created by oil-shale-fired electricity generation is subsidised to such an extent that it places Estonia among the world’s top water consumers, along with the desert states which use irrigation agriculture. If we consider that drinking water costs three euros a litre in Tallinn Airport, it becomes apparent that power generation in Estonia is being subsidised with a sum of around three billion euros a year. At the same time, Estonia is lagging behind other European countries in the use of renewable energy sources, despite the high potential for both biofuels and wind energy. The point I am trying to make is that, while I acknowledge the progress made at COP-10 in Buenos Aires and the leading role of the EU in combating global climate change, it is time for the European Commission and Parliament to act together to persuade lagging member states to change their energy policies, using the structural funds if necessary."@en1
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