Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-01-31-Speech-3-076"
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"en.20070131.19.3-076"2
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"Mr President, I listened very carefully to what Minister Gabriel said, because the headlines in the Irish papers today state: ‘Germany fights EU limits on car emissions’. The papers go on to state that ‘German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to fight “with full vigour” the plans to introduce across-the-board limits on CO2 emissions from cars …’. My two minutes does not allow me to continue.
You have a big PR exercise, Minister, if what you say is accurate rather than that which the German President of the Council says. Therefore, please sort out the confusion that exists there at the moment, particularly as Chancellor Merkel’s address at the start of the German Presidency was excellent and most encouraging in this particular area, and she has guaranteed that this issue will take high priority on the summit agenda in March.
We need greater political ownership of this debate. The real problem is – and I say this through the Chair to our Commissioner as well as to the Minister – that we have left it to our officials and our diplomats. Yes, Nairobi was ‘a step forward’ in preparing the ground. That is what you said. But it was a
step forward, a
step forward: hardly an improvement on what had been agreed in Montreal.
It makes no sense for thousands of us from hundreds of countries to meet once a year, use up carbon and fly to all sorts of locations to sit and argue mainly about what should be on the agenda, then leave again after up to two weeks, only to come back 12 months later to pick up the argument about the agenda that we had left 12 months earlier! If what we say and all the reports from economists, NGOs, environmentalists and eminent scientists are right – and they are right, 99% of the community agree they right – then we must take the highest political ownership of the resolution of the problem. That is at summit level: not only at summit meetings, but also at the COPs and the MOPs and in Nairobi and wherever else we meet. We must drive it upstairs to prime-ministerial and head-of-state level throughout the 12 months of the year, and not just the annual meeting at the United Nations Convention on Climate Change or the Kyoto MOP meeting.
We need political ownership at the highest level. Drive the agenda, please."@en1
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"baby’s"1
"tortuous"1
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