It is amazing what media attention can do. Now that all of them have seen the green light (or is it the “inconventient truth”?), politicians are trying to compete for becoming the climate champion of the year, the “EU Al Gore”. If ever the thesis about our “spectacle” democracy needed any confirmation, we can find it in the “spectacular” way climate change (an issue known since the beginning of the 90s) has fired itself onto the political agenda.
Who would have thought one year ago that new French President Sarkozy would have a superminister for ecology? Why is even Brown becoming green? 
And of course, our respected members of the European Parliament just had to wake up to the climate heat too. So, let’s create a 60-members big special committee which is going to find THE solution by travelling around the world to talk to other parliaments.
Ah, and another good idea: let’s make the European Parliament “carbon-neutral”, that will show them. So the EP Bureau is to decide on 18 June to commission some “independent external experts” to evaluate the Parliament’s carbon footprint in order to later define an action plan to reduce greenhouse gas reductions of the Brussels and Strasbourg activities.
Oops, but small problem there. The issue of the two seats is kind of a taboo and, for sure, not the competence of the MEPs themselves but of the 27 governments of the EU. So we will not measure the carbon footprint of the fact of having two seats (a study by the way which was commissioned by Green MEPs Caroline Lucas and Jean Lambert last month).
My recommendation to all my dear MEP friends: maybe the next European Parliament (the one chosen by probably one third of our voters in 2009) should declare a five-year moratorium on its normal activities and focus itself on defining a new European eco-vision? Now, wouldn’t that be something?
