Verbatim report of proceedings

Monday, 14 September 2020 - Brussels

Global data collection system for ship fuel oil consumption data (debate)

  Jytte Guteland, on behalf of the S&D Group. – Mr President, Europe is going through this huge transition from our history as a coal and steel union to the climate neutrality union. Everyone needs to contribute in that transition and today the shipping sector is not part of it. They sail away and do their own thing. It’s not acceptable. We need to make sure that everyone is part of this transition if we are to deliver what it is our right to do, as politicians. We know that the shipping sector also has a very negative impact on the climate and it risks to have even more so in the future. It’s extremely worrying that it, in fact, has proceeded to raise its contribution to emissions between 50 or 250% to 2050, when we are supposed to be climate neutral.

We in the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) refuse to stand passive and therefore we are very happy that in this monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) system is a good piece of legislation for reporting emissions, but now we finally have an Emissions Trading System (ETS) proposed on the table and we believe this will be very important to take this sector under its, rightly, demand to contribute. We also demand that every ship will reduce its emissions by at least 40% by the year 2030.

It should not be free to destroy the future – not the climate, not the environment – and we know that the environment is also hit by this sector today; biodiversity, air quality, we need to do something about that. Therefore, we would like to have a fund for the sea to help the sector improve on all this and we would also like a big part of this fund to go towards helping the sector to transition.

So this is a really clever proposal that we worked on together. I would like to say to the rapporteur and to all the shadow rapporteurs that I have been very honoured to work with you. I really think we have something good on the table.