mr president i hope that i am proved to be wrong but it looks to me increasingly unlikely that the talks begun and continued at copenhagen will in fact lead to a legally binding treaty committing all of the major emitters in the world to large emission cuts
in those circumstances i believe it would be very foolish for those of us in the eu debating these matters to agree to even further emissions reductions
a figure of thirty has been mentioned
mrs hassi just mentioned forty
in the absence of a worldwide agreement i think we would be crazy to agree to further reductions because what we will do is run the risk of saddling our consumers with some of the highest energy bills in the developed world making european heavy industry and large energy consumers particularly uncompetitive in a worldwide environment
already we have seen a lot of industry relocating to outside the eu simply of course transferring emissions from the eu to china india and elsewhere
this is a crazy economic policy because it has no net benefit for the environment whatsoever
in fact in some respects it has a net deleterious effect on the environment as those goods are simply re-imported back into the eu after all
what we need is a comprehensive worldwide agreement
i am fully in favour of that
i hope we will work towards achieving it but in the absence of one we should be very wary of further unilateral cuts in europe
