Speeches

Mr President, I congratulate the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) and my colleague Grace O’Sullivan on the excellent work they have done on this report. They have improved a lot and done a great job with the Commission’s proposal. The Eight Environment Action Plan covers a crucial decade. This is our decade to get it right, to start living within the planetary boundaries in all our policies, in all fields of the environment. The International Energy Agency has estimated that to reach our rising demand for electricity and greening our energy systems, we might require as much as USD 131 trillion investment in renewables by 2050. Thirty-seven percent of the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility should be invested in climate actions but this will clearly not be enough. At the same time, fossil fuels are still being subsidised by EUR 50 billion every year. So, dear colleagues, I urge you all to vote for the ENVI report in its entirety, calling for the phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies by 2025 and other environmental harmful subsidies by 2027.