mr president i want to pay tribute to mr bendtsen who has worked extremely hard on this report and cooperated closely with the shadows from other parties
he has succeeded in bringing parliamentarians together on this issue and he deserves warm congratulations
energy saving ticks an awful lot of boxes
first of all climate change
cancún has reminded us how much we need to do and energy saving is the cheapest and easiest way of moving to a thirty reduction in greenhouse gases
secondly energy security
i was in zaghreb last week discussing croatia's accession with liberal colleagues and they told me that croatia imports fifty of its energy and also uses twice as much energy as it would do if proper energy efficiency measures were in place
now that energy is a shared european competence under the lisbon treaty energy efficiency must also be a shared responsibility
by doing more on energy saving we are also tackling the very practical problems that people face in their lives
too many people are living in fuel poverty struggling to keep warm in houses that are not properly insulated
making homes more energy efficient puts money in people's pockets to spend in the local economy at this time of financial and economic difficulty
it would also create many thousands of jobs in the local economy
so given all these positive effects it comes as a great shock to realise that the twenty energy efficiency target is the one part of the twenty twenty package which is currently heading for failure as the commissioner said
indeed the latest figures show that we are on target to reach only nine of the projected twenty by twenty twenty
and the time has come i think for us to put up our hands and admit that we got it wrong in two thousand and eight
we should have made the target binding then and we really need to go forward now and find ways of making it possible
i thank the commissioner for having given us an insight into what he is preparing for the next year
i think the time has come to make a political decision here that we have to have a binding energy saving target because without it we are actually undermining everything else that we do on the economy on energy security and on climate change
