French Green Congress Proposes Motorway Freeze
Date: 25-Oct-07
Country: FRANCE
Author: Elizabeth Pineau
The congress also recommends that France should increase the amount of energy produced from renewable sources like solar and wind power from 9 percent at present to 20 percent by 2020.
Two days of roundtable discussions on Wednesday and Thursday will wrap up three months of work by six panels tasked with providing recommendations in areas ranging from biodiversity to to building regulations.
Many of the measures focus on road transport, with the aim of cutting greenhouse gas emissions from the roads by 22 percent by 2020. Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo wants to take transiting heavy freight vehicles off French motorways and plans two major freight rail routes over the coming five years.
France has lagged other European countries -- such as Germany or the Scandinavian nations -- in promoting measures to protect the environment, but Sarkozy made sustainable development one of his priorities when he was elected in May.
NOBEL AUDIENCE
Sarkozy will make the final decisions and announce which proposals will be taken forward in a speech on Thursday in front of Nobel Peace prize winners Al Gore and Wangari Maathai, as well as European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso.
Further discussions will follow before a more detailed set of some 15 proposals is unveiled at the end of the year and a bill is brought before parliament in the first half of 2008.
The meeting of government, environmentalists, scientists and business leaders is one of the most prominent green initiatives ever launched in France and reflects the higher profile of environmental issues as concern has risen over global warming.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon, who briefly visited the discussions at the environment ministry, said the meetings had shown that "a new form of governance" was being created by the encounter between groups that were often opposed to each other.
"I have come to say that the government is committed to adopting all precise, concrete and consensual proposals."
Environmental group Greenpeace gave a tepid welcome to the proposals that emerged on Wednesday, saying that the freeze on new motorway construction did not go far enough as it left out projects that had been approved but not yet begun.
It also said that many measures were still not clearly enough defined.
