Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-05-18-Speech-2-548"
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"en.20100518.36.2-548"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, I too feel that we need to stop those in industry from playing God.
Today, more than ever, the industrialised nations are thirsty for oil. They are drilling everything they can, and at ever-increasing depths, which clearly increases the risk of accidents. In recent times, the industries have favoured exploration and extraction, to the detriment of safety and of the environment; every day for almost a month now, 800 000 litres of crude oil have been flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, and the environmental and economic damage will be catastrophic. I see a huge gap between the colossal sums spent on deeper and deeper extraction and the utterly inadequate resources devoted to the upstream prevention and the anticipation of risks.
Like my fellow Members, I too demand several things. Firstly, I think we need to conduct an audit of all the oil platforms to check their state of repair, their level of safety and their compliance with standards. Of course, we also need to perform platform inspections, even if these inspections are the responsibility of the Member States, and we need inspections by the Commission of the inspections themselves.
Furthermore, I think we need to protect the most fragile ecosystems once and for all. In this respect, as well as the initiative which you have taken and which I welcome, to try to ascertain how we could cope with such circumstances if a similar accident were to happen off our coasts, I do think that Europe must take initiatives to protect the most fragile ecosystems once and for all. I am thinking about Alaska, for example. We need an international convention on the same model as that which exists for the protection of resources in Antarctica, and Europe could spearhead this type of work and this type of convention.
Finally, if we still needed one, this is a very good reason to invest more and sooner in renewable energies. The volcano – I will not say its name, because it is unpronounceable – was a sign for us on the issue of air transport; in the same way, this terrible accident is another sign for us on the issue of oil extraction. It is time for us to acknowledge that the folly of racing to extract oil anywhere and at any cost is behind us."@en1
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