Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-07-08-Speech-2-119"
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"en.20080708.6.2-119"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, Madam President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank you for your compliments and would in turn pass them on to all those who have helped in this project. I would also like to thank you for the criticisms that have been expressed in some quarters.
Allow me to clarify some things again: one of the speakers said that we had been indulging in back-room politics. I do not believe this was the case. The whole process was very open and the speaker himself was present at every stage, the shadow rapporteur was kept informed of all the details and in my group we also discussed matters among ourselves. I do not know if that also happened in the speaker’s group, but in any case for us it was all very open and above board, even on an internal level.
We managed to get the Council of Ministers to accept many of our proposals. The Commissioner said that it was more ambitious than the original Commission proposal and the number of amendments alone that we succeeded in putting through – some 30 in all – shows that we were able to alter the common position, and in some cases quite substantially.
Mr Lucas, Mr Holm and others have said that all this falls short of the expectations of the environmental groups. That is correct, but neither would it have been a good compromise if we had incorporated everything that the environmentalists and Greens had been demanding.
In two areas – and the Commissioner also referred to these – there is still some room for adjustment. With the report presented by Avril Doyle we again have an opportunity to adjust the cap and the auctioning level so that they are fair to other participants in the emissions trading system We need to look very closely at this in the second half of the year.
In conclusion I should again like to stress that what we want is equal terms of competition. We want a global agreement and we also want to include in it flights from third countries. However, it is about time that the airlines helped us out. I see a letter from the AEA – the Association of European Airlines – stating that even after the compromise has been reached other governments will understandably reject it. We need to consider whether we should still be engaging such people, as they make very poor lobbyists.
We shall now be adopting this agreement with a very large majority and will then join forces to plead our case before third countries. Then we will all be working together. However, if Parliament’s democratic decision is not accepted we will have to tell the airlines that they are only harming themselves. I ask you to approve the recommendation and would like to express my thanks for the broad support I have received."@en1
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