17
Apr
2023
Watch
Revision of the EU Emissions Trading System - Monitoring, reporting and verification of greenhouse gas emissions from maritime transport - Carbon border adjustment mechanism - Social Climate Fund - Revision of the EU Emissions Trading System for aviation (debate)
Mr President, thank you very much. Europe needs to protect both the climate and competitiveness. Without safeguarding competitiveness, both jobs and the climate are the big losers, because if we make impossible demands, the result will be that companies move their production outside the borders of the Union, where emissions will be greater. That is why we need to formulate climate legislation that is ambitious but also realistic. That was my entry when I represented the EPP in the negotiations on EU emissions trading. We now have a final result to consider. There I am happy to see a lot of the proposals that the Christian Democrats have pushed in the process and that red-green parties tried to stop. One of the key points is that the free allocation of allowances to strategically important industries is phased out at a more responsible pace than in the original proposal. We also received an exemption for benchmarks that protect European steel production and encourage new technologies for steel production. We got through increased incentives for companies that store or use carbon dioxide, where they should be able to resell those allowances so that it pays to capture their emissions. And despite the Green Party’s protests, we got through that the revenues from the emissions trading should be able to go to more carbon storage and electrification of aviation and that the revenues should actually be able to go to investing in new nuclear power. The latter is only the last example of the fact that those who claimed in the previous European elections that nuclear power is not an EU issue could not have been more wrong.