Speeches

Mr President, Commissioner, during this debate we have talked a lot about fairness, but we all know that fairness is a rather difficult concept. The Commissioner said that no one will be left behind, but nevertheless we are in a situation where these differences easily create incomprehensible situations from which justice is quite a long way off. We are talking about biodiversity, but diversity also occurs at different speeds in different countries, and mutations, for example, occur very differently in different forests and are linked to the life cycle and biological age of an organism. There are also phenomena that are difficult to measure. How much Finnish forest is needed, for example, to replace the emissions of Dutch pigs? I don't know this. I suspect Commissioner Timmermans does not know this either, but let's see if there are any more answers. The heating of buildings has caused a lot of problems and controversy. Most of the Finnish apartments are already relying on district heating or heat pumps, so for us the transition would have been quite easy. For others it would have been very difficult. However, we are now apparently forced to move into the future in a way that is not necessarily good for Finland but is socially meaningful for other countries. But you will see that we are constantly struggling with different metrics, and there are not always the right answers. In January, we discussed with the Commissioner what is the most difficult part of this reform. He said that maintaining energy is the hardest thing to do, and so it was in January. On February 24th, this became much, much more difficult. Nevertheless, I am voting in favour of this proposal.

Mr President, a quick glance at a map of central Europe 150 years ago shows that the area was totally dominated by four empires: the Habsburg, the German, the Ottoman and the Russian. On the map, you don’t see the Polish, the Czechs, the Estonians, the Slovaks, the Hungarians, the Latvians, the Romanians, the Bulgarians, the Lithuanians, the Croatians, the Serbs, the Bosniaks, the Austrians, you don’t see the Jews, you don’t see the Roma, and you don’t even see the Finns. Then change started to happen, and we thought that the era of suppressing empires with their spheres of interest would be over. But when we look at the new map from 1848, for instance, you see something very peculiar. The three empires have vanished, but one is bigger and more influential than ever before. The Russian Empire was still there, although another name, and it’s still there trying to enlarge their spheres of influence by energy resources and by the army. But we earlier oppressed peoples of Europe have one message: the era of empires is over. In the same manner, the era of fossil empires is over, and the politically fossilised empires are over. And we are going to do our part by decarbonising our enemy and economy, and by joining NATO.

Madam President, let me start with a statement we all know is true but the implication of which we tend to go around. There will be no quick and easy fixes. For an undefinable time we will have an unstable and unreliable Russia on our borders. And the implications are huge, and we seem to be slightly unwilling to understand this. From the very first day, I said that we need to have two windows: one for speeding up the transition to a low carbon economy, the other to find bridging solutions for the next three, five, seven years. So far, we seem to be united, but as soon as we go into the concrete proposals, everybody seems to bring in his or her ‘holy cow’: LNG is not good; we need gas; renewables are good as long as they don’t come from bio sources or forests; or then we speak about prices, and so on. But the truth is the following: every cubic metre of Russian gas, every barrel of Russian oil, every load of Russian coal is dripping with blood – innocent Ukrainian blood.

Madam President, High Representative. Kallis Kaja, tere tulemast tagasi parlamenti, ainult veidi teises rollis. During the last few days, I have had flashbacks from my years as a correspondent in Russia. I covered the first war in Chechnya and I saw the catastrophic results of moral decay in the Russian army. And a morally decayed or derailed army is something very, very dangerous. And we see the same political decay inside the walls of the Kremlin. Today, with the tragic results for Ukraine, for the young men, for the mothers and the children, we see the result of this moral catastrophe. Who wanted this? If you use the words of Yevtushenko’s poem ‘Khotyat li russkiye voyny?’ (Do the Russians want war?), there is a sentence saying ‘You ask those soldiers that lie under the birches, and let their sons tell you, ‘khotyat li russkiye voyny’ (whether the Russians want war). The Russians don’t want the war. The one who’s wanting it is Mr Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Let us make this his last wish.

Mr President, I would like to thank my dear friends for their efforts. We started to turn this table around after the 2015 Paris Agreement. We tweaked different parts and sectors of the issues. This led very easily to us choosing different issues according to the different priorities of different parties. What we now are trying to do is to turn the whole system around. This is, of course, a much more complicated issue. When we tweak different parts of the whole, we do not need to bother about how they fit into a systemic whole. When you look into the challenges of COP26 and Fit for 57, we need to take into account how the different parts fit into each other, and that’s going to make it much more difficult. As Commissioner Timmermans said in his speech, this is the challenge we have in front of us. We are at the beginning of an enormous challenge because there will be frictions between the different parts of the different issues we are trying to change. But we have just one choice: we will and we must prevail.

Mr President, to not repeat what my colleagues have already said, I have a map with me. You probably can’t see all the details of the map, but it’s actually very interesting. On this side, you see what China has been building and is planning in terms of coal power production. This is India. This is the United States. This map could easily be used to pinpoint and point fingers at developing countries. But this is not actually what I’m trying to convey in this speech. There is a more interesting part when you look at the technological side of the factories, because all of a sudden you see a lot of western companies actually doing a lot of work in these parts of the world, where they are earning dirty money by building power stations fired by coal. So I think what we have to do in Glasgow is to find the leadership and show that this is not the way forward. We need to show that there are other technologies and we need to be generous with these technologies, because those who are in need of them won’t have the money to use them unless we give it to them. Therefore, as my friend Commissioner Sinkevičius said on developing countries, doing something to get the money on the table is very important.

Madam President, thank you very much. Commissioner, Minister! Actually, we were striving for this. With emissions trading, we wanted to achieve higher energy prices and now we have succeeded. The only error in this context is that we have some system errors in the way the entire program is structured. If you look at the old data on ‘effort sharing’, you can see that some countries got away very easily at an earlier stage. And now they're in trouble. At the same time, when we try to put renewables on hold, for ideological reasons, we are creating new problems ahead of us. At the same time, it looks like someone in the Commission was hoping for hydrogen solutions to come faster than they will. We do not yet see any investment in this area. So, in fact, we have paved the way for this problem, and now we will have to try to solve it in the future negotiations. And then there's another system error. The system error is called Russia. Russia's budget is horribly dependent on high energy prices. Congratulations and welcome to reality!

Mr President, the IPCC report was a serious reminder of the path our planet is on. Even if the European Union does its utmost now, the goal of staying at one and a half degrees is escaping from the hands of the world community. It is precisely for this reason that COP26 in Glasgow will be at the heart of the decisions to be taken now. Even if the EU is now at the forefront, everything now depends on how the EU example affects the dynamics of the meeting. The experience of COP25 in Madrid is a good warning. But there is one more warning that applies to all of us. Polish scientist Jan Zielonka wrote a bit of a sore and tart book Europe as Empire. In it he warns against a method in which decisions come from above the great wisdom of the Commission, above all proportionality. Citizens and Member States should support and participate. Otherwise, this won't work.