Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-10-Speech-1-070"
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"en.20050110.12.1-070"2
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"Mr President, a year ago I was at the Milan Climate Change Conference, and it must be said that a number of advances have been made since then. On that occasion we met representatives of the US delegation, as was also the case this time in Buenos Aires. Whereas in Milan the US representatives were still categorically denying the human contribution to climate change, this time their attitude had softened. They now had to acknowledge facts to the extent that they agreed to talk about the possible human contribution to climate change.
Despite that admission, however, there is still a long way to go before we will persuade the United States of America to commit to a universal effort to prevent climate warming. There is thus a need for more common sense. We have numerous examples of how preventive action is far less costly than dealing with catastrophes after they have happened. That is why it is an economic absurdity that the United States is not rushing flat out to participate in cooperation on climate, instead of risking the entire planet trying to protect its competitiveness.
Another step forward at Milan was Russia’s involvement, which enabled the Kyoto Protocol to come into force. That is an important factor as a political gesture, but whether it will be any more than that remains to be seen. I fear the worst: that climate targets under the current Kyoto agreement will barely make any further progress at all.
Why should that be? At the conference the Minister of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment for the Netherlands, the country holding the presidency, said quite rightly that the problem for the future is, in particular, China’s emissions, whose rate of increase has come as a total surprise to the parties to the agreement. No disciplinary action can be taken under the Kyoto agreement, as China is not included among the industrialised countries that the emissions restrictions apply to in the first phase. Kyoto can do nothing, therefore, to bring two huge problems under control: the United States, which is at present responsible for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and China, whose emissions are estimated to grow to four times those of the United States in ten years’ time. That means the world’s emissions will double within ten years. If that is the case, we will all perish.
It is of the utmost urgency that we repair the situation now in order to strengthen climate policy, especially in China and India, to avoid making mistakes that cannot be put right later on while we await the second phase. Some of the taboos associated with Kyoto have to be removed, and it needs to be said that in some respects it is an unsuccessful way of solving the problem of climate warming.
It would seem that, as a result of the targets for reductions in individual countries, the countries that are parties to the agreement are locked in a continuing struggle to protect their own interests. For that reason, we need a binding international ‘carbon dynamics’ approach, from which nobody can be excluded. In the globalising market economy, that is the only way to prevent international capital from transferring its production to places where emission limits do not exceed environmental norms. Consequently, we must set figures for emissions per tonne of production to act as emissions criteria for industry, and a careful definition of the theoretical minimum for emissions is needed for different sectors. We urgently need to think about energy in an entirely new way, structured above all around saving energy, increasing efficiency, and renewable and non-polluting forms of energy.
Finally, I would like to express my profound gratitude to Commissioner Dimas, who took excellent account of the views of the Members of the European Parliament throughout the entire conference."@en1
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