Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-24-Speech-4-025"
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"en.20080424.5.4-025"2
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"Mr President, I welcome Ms Ferreira’s excellent work and cooperation, thanks to which we have before us a report that gives a comprehensive and honest appraisal of the potential and limitations of market-based instruments.
Market instruments clearly have a role to play. Making economic logic align with environmental and social reality by applying the ‘polluter pays’ principle should be a powerful way of steering patterns of production and consumption towards sustainability. For example, if the true environmental and social costs of freight transport were internalised within prices paid along the supply chain, we might finally see an end to the madness that sees more or less identical products being pointlessly traded back and forth between distant countries.
Applying such principles at the level of individuals via a system of personal carbon trading could be an extremely effective way of influencing consumer behaviour. But, as Ms Ferreira’s report rightly makes clear, market instruments must not be seen as a replacement for other forms of environmental standards and regulation. Their usefulness also depends crucially on the way in which they are designed.
The emissions trading system is a case in point. I would like to warn colleagues that, if we listen to a lot of what the industry is telling us, we will end up with a scheme that is no more than trading backwards and forwards for the sake of trading, as we have seen with the first two phases, completely losing sight of any environmental objectives. To be effective, the scheme has to have a tough cap deriving from the 30% emissions reduction target, restrictions on the entry of outside credits and full auctioning of allowances from the outset.
Finally, I would like to mention one other welcome thread running through the report – the recognition that traditional economic growth as measured by GDP is no longer an adequate or accurate measure of true well-being. A conference was held on this topic in Parliament earlier this year and I look forward to the Commission’s report in the autumn."@en1
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