Bas Eickhout, on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group. – Madam President, first of all I too would like to thank Julie Girling, who stepped in later in the process and did a great job in delivering this result.

I know you probably are not happy back home, Ms Girling, but the Greens too are thanking you. That doesn’t help you at home, but still the thanks are there, and we as Greens can also support the reform because it’s an improvement on what we have. Though let’s be honest: it is not very difficult to get an improvement on what we have, right?

And that is really still the problem. Finally we are doing something on the surplus of allowances, and getting rid of that surplus to a certain extent, but we’re not there yet. This system is still not functioning right. The prices are now around EUR 10, whereas we know that, for Paris implementation, prices need to be around EUR 40 or 50, and we know that the emission trading system alone will not deliver that.

So this is a good basis we have developed, we can support the improvement, but now it’s time for Member States to take national action and implement additional, national, policies because this alone will not deliver Paris, and you all know that.