Derek Osborn
One of the plenary debates this week was around an opinion, drafted by a British member, Derek Osborn (Various Interests Group) about ‘facing the oil challenges’. The opinion was special in two ways. First, it was an opinion requested by the European Parliament, which was a previously rare occurence but an indication of the Committee’s growing profile among parliamentarians. Second, and as with the Delapina opinion (see previous post), it had to be drafted very rapidly and therefore Derek had to act as a ‘General Rapporteur’ (in effect, it’s the Committee’s ‘fast track’ procedure). I’ll post a link to the adopted opinion here as soon as it has been finalised, but during the debate I was struck by an observation made by Stéphane Buffetaut (Employers Group), President of the Committee’s Sustainable Development Observatory. He recounted that he had been talking with some oil industry executives and one had told him that the age of oil would end like the stone age had ended – not because there were no more stones, but because of a technological leap. Thinking about it, our generations have been living through the ends of a number of ‘ages’, precisely because of such technological advances – the age of steam, the age of the typewriter and the fax, the age of the incandescent lightbulb….
Stéphane Buffetaut
It was indeed a challenge to have to produce an opinion on the long
term future of oil in the space of only a few weeks. But as Dr Johnson
said “Nothing so concentrates a man’s mind as the prospect of execution the next day.” And in some ways it was indeed an advantage to concentrate intensively on the subject for a few days at a stretch, to have a quick round of meetings with all the principal players involved and to get the text going while it was all clear and fresh in my mind.
It also meant that I had to focus very sharply and clearly on two or
three big issues (climate change, growing supply problems in the oil
sector, and the need to find new sources of energy for the transport and household sectors) and avoid getting side-tracked into the many second order issues I could have taken up.
The result seemed to go down quite well in the Plenary. Let’s hope it
also generates some interest when I present it to the Parliament next week to assist their own work on the same subject.
I couldn’t have achieved all this in the time without major input from
the staff, Sven Dammann and Eric Ponthieu. They assembled masses of evidence and documentation, set up meetings at short notice with key people in the Commission, the industry and NGOs, kept in touch with the Parliament, organised Press releases and outreach etc. They were extraordinarily helpful as critical friends and advisers as we sharpened up the text through several drafts. I can see considerable scope for developing this way of working in the future.