What Morten spoke about.

The overwhelming majority of the Council members were outraged by the anti-LGBTIQ law Orbán introduced in Hungary. Rightfully so. Orbán has crossed redlines before but that was a new low. I welcome the response by most heads of state and government but it should not stop here. The Council needs to trigger Article 7 against this Hungarian Government. All legal means should be applied in order to sh

Mr President! Let me start by congratulating the rapporteurs, because the Net Zero Industry Act is a good step in the right direction. The rules of the game have changed in the new global world order, where our green European industry is fighting for market share with American and not least Chinese protectionism. Europe's green transition lacks funding, and if we want a Europe that is competitive

Mr President! The electricity market reform that we will adopt later today is a big win for consumers, for green investors and for our climate goals. The reform provides better opportunities for the expansion of offshore wind on, for example, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, which have huge potentials, and it will contribute decisively to, for example, Denmark's ambitions to become what might be

Mr President! We must achieve our goal of a climate-neutral Europe by 2050, and we must stop financing Putin's attack on Ukraine. In fact, we can do both by adopting and implementing the building directive we are discussing here tonight. According to new calculations, the EPBD could save Europe between 21 and 44 billion cubic metres of gas per year. By comparison, total gas imports from Russia in

Mr President! I think there is every reason to welcome the Commission's 2040 target. It is good to reduce emissions by at least 90%. It is good that the EU is at the forefront in this area. It helps inspire us, the United States, China and other continents. For the high ambitions they drive us to do everything in our power to become climate neutral by 2050. And, of course, it is crucial that these

Madam President! It is a great pleasure to be here today to discuss a report on geothermal energy. It was not a given thing that we could get it done, but we have succeeded, and we should be happy about that, because there are so many positive elements and consequences and perspectives in this form of energy. And it has been completely overlooked, and it is therefore good that we have it on the ag

Mr. President! We in the European Parliament had the opportunity, among other things, to meet representatives of small island states at the Dubai Summit and they could tell us, in all their horrors, how their societies are simply disappearing. How rising sea levels are causing incredible damage to their communities, and they are undergoing some really fiercely difficult reflections because climate

Madam President! We are looking into a new worldview, a new world order, geopolitically, security-politically and indeed also industrially, and this requires us to react from the European side, and this Net Zero Industry Act is a good example of this, and there are plenty of good measures in what we have on the table today, such as the whole issue of permits, so-called 'permittings'. And a very co

Madam President! The world is heading for catastrophic temperature rises, which is why it is of course an incredibly important climate summit that we are looking into. How extreme weather phenomena are unfortunately becoming everyday, and where research indicates that water levels will rise for hundreds of years to come, so it is the question of the extent of the disaster that we are discussing no

Mr President! The annual progress report on our European Energy Union is an important tool in the fight against climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels and, not least, Putin's gas. The bad news is that 2023 is set to be the warmest year ever measured on Earth. The good news is that we know what it takes to fight climate change. We need more renewable energy in our grid. More energy effic

Mr President! A journey through Europe, starting in Lisbon and ending in Tallinn, takes about 44 hours by car across the European continent. Such a journey is possible without stopping and showing passports at a single border because of our Schengen cooperation. It has created a sense of freedom and cohesion, which is, of course, at the heart of our European project. But the increased freedom also

Mr. President! We have again received a highly alarming IPCC report underlining the disastrous consequences of extreme weather events. Natural and human systems are being pushed beyond their ability to adapt, and the report reports on influences so profound that it is already too late to reverse. And that only underlines the need for faster action to reduce our emissions and, not least, to increas

Madam President! Buildings account for 40% of European energy consumption. Energy efficient buildings are therefore crucial for combating climate change. And after Putin's vile attacks on innocent people in Ukraine, it is even more urgent to free Europe from Putin's gas. When we vote tomorrow on something as technical as a building directive, we are not just voting for the green. We are also votin

Madam President! Organised fraud and humbug cost us €5.4 billion in 2021, according to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, EPPO. And it is, after all, a monstrous amount of money, which only shows the importance of having a European Public Prosecutor's Office dedicated to detecting cross-border fraud. There is every reason to increase the budget of the prosecution service and extend its power

Madam President! We need much more green electricity in Europe and we need to become much better at saving energy. We must do so in order to achieve our climate goals, and we must do so in order to free ourselves from Putin's iron grip on European energy supply. And in this way, renewable energy and energy efficiency have become security policies from the top shelf, and therefore we need faster pe

Madam President! The energy crisis that we are in the middle of shows very clearly how much we need a genuine internal energy market, precisely in order to reduce our dependence and to increase our energy security. Europe is already perhaps the largest connected market with more than 400 interconnectors. However, the Member States have much more to do in order to achieve the 70% target that we joi

Mr. President! Climate change is raging, and Putin's attacks on Ukraine show us that we can no longer or must no longer rely on Putin's gas. This is why the development of renewable energy is so important. It has now become a security policy. And yes, the production of renewable energy is local, and it can thus be made independent of Putin's gas, but we need to do it faster than we do today. It is

Mr President! Putin's attack on Ukraine challenges us all, demands common answers and demands solidarity among member states. And the grotesque thing is that we Europeans have basically sponsored the building of Putin's war machine for decades by buying his gas. It has to end and it has to end now. That's why yesterday was a good day. And I would like to acknowledge the fine proposals that were pu

Madam President! The war in Ukraine has been started by Putin, but basically paid for by ourselves, because we have become accustomed to using Russian gas. Not just last year, but for decades. In this way, we in Europe are almost like drug addicts who have to go to rehab now. I'm old enough to remember the oil crisis back in 1973, when I remember playing football on the streets of Copenhagen witho

Mr President, let me start out by saying that, from Renew Europe’s side, we are quite happy with the Commission’s proposal on Joint European action for more affordable, secure and sustainable energy that was communicated this afternoon. I think it is fair to say that Renew Europe is happy to repower Europe. We still need to go through the text in detail, but I think we all find that the Commission

Madam President! Thank you, colleagues, thank you, Commissioner Simpson. Thank you for the debate tonight. I am pleased that there has been such broad support, such broad political grounding, for this important issue. Because it is incredibly important that there really is a broad-based ownership to it by turbo-boosting the expansion of offshore wind. A few comments from the debate: I think the Co

Madam President! Offshore wind is key to achieving our climate goals. If we are to achieve our climate goals in any way, it requires more renewable energy - much more. In fact, we're so busy, it's hard to believe. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has told us that it is urgent and that, even if all countries' climate pledges are met, global emissions will still rise more than th

Mr President! First of all, I think it is important to say that it is incredibly important that we discuss the state of the Energy Union here in Parliament once a year in order, like taking stock of this incredibly important project. And, of course, it is gratifying to see how, for the first time, renewable energy surpassed fossil fuels as the most important energy source in Europe in 2020. On the

Mr President! The day after the Glasgow Climate Summit ended, the BBC brought a story that the air in India's capital Delhi is so polluted that schoolchildren must stay home indefinitely. Imagine that children can't go to school because the air around them is so dangerous to health. It shows something about the challenge we face. And frankly, that makes it almost incomprehensible that countries li

Mr President! The United Nations has recently calculated that even if all countries' current climate promises were met, global emissions would still rise, corresponding to temperatures rising by as much as 2.7 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. And that's catastrophic. Nothing less. Reducing global emissions to zero by 2050 is the only way forward. But it's too slow. We simply need to raise our cli