Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-03-07-Speech-1-114"
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"en.20050307.13.1-114"2
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"Mr President, I am very much obliged to the Commissioner for his factual responses to the questions from the Communists and Socialists.
The fact is that their ideological …
Yes, Mr Swoboda, now just listen to me. The ideological baggage you packed into your question defies description. The Commissioner gave a factual answer; he used the opportunity to set out a number of starting points relating to his prospects for a proper energy policy.
I think it erroneous to take the energy and oil firms’ windfall profits as a pretext for distracting from one’s own responsibility for renewable energies, and for that error the Socialists and Communists in this House must bear responsibility.
We have just heard the figures: EUR 60 billion in profits! Let me remind Mr Turmes that oil prices are driven up not only by the oil-producing countries and the crude oil companies, but also and primarily by states, through taxation. In my own Member State, Germany, alone, approximate calculations indicate that the public become liable to over EUR 30 billion in additional taxes every year. This is a problem from which this sort of question should not divert attention, and I am grateful to the Greens and Liberals for having broadened the issue and enabled us to have a proper and wide-ranging debate today.
What we can do is, I think, plain to see. We all remember well the debate we had on biofuels; it was not this House, but the unwillingness of the Member States, that prevented the inclusion of mandatory blending, and now Mr Swoboda wants to impose on the Commission an obligation it will never be able to discharge. We have to keep our feet on the ground and stick to the areas where we are in a position to do something – security of energy supply, the development of alternative forms of energy, promoting research, the overall framework. That is where we have to discharge this responsibility, but not by taking the excessive profits of oil companies as our starting point.
In 1973, it was estimated that the oil reserves would last for another 30 years. The reason why they will now last for far longer is that these profits were used to seek out new stocks of crude oil. We rely on that being where the responsibility for the security of our energy supply is discharged."@en1
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