In the week where the climate negotiations come back to the arena with the restart of the UN conversations in Bonn, the European Parliament carried out a debate with the National Parliaments on a European energy community for the 21^st century.

Gathered together during two days, the national elected deputies of EU members’ states and candidate countries had considered that the national ambition is still too modest when compared with the European energy common strategy. “But how to move forward without the necessary financial mechanisms?” asked the spokesperson responsible for the working groups.

If the year of 2009 has proved that the European Union cannot keep on with such a high degree of energy dependence from external countries, the year of 2010 and the entrance of the Lisbon Treaty into force had not yet allowed an adequate development of the considered European basic standards for the new European energy strategy, based on the supplying security, competitiveness and sustainability. However, according to EC vice-president European commissioner for competition, Joaquin Almunia, “in the last period, the UE already obtained a convergence between the new technologies and the environmental sustainability”. European strategy 2020, will be already approved on the next week, but Joaquin Almunia speaks of a gradual effort to be made until 2050 in order to reach an independent energy efficiency in relation to carbon. In a short-term approach, the commissioner insisted on the urgency of the third energy package approval up to 2011 as the key objective for the creation of a single market, but with a regional cooperation.

In the working groups’ conclusions’, the members of the parliaments had still pointed the necessity of energy being considered as a geopolitical factor and not as a market, where a better awareness should be developed over the population and over the governments. MP’s called on the need of complementary measures beyond the existing legal structure, with a strengthened cooperation between the member states and the candidate countries, where Turkey will play an important role in the energy dynamics. The complementary measures “do not justify a new treaty specifically for the energy questions, but some questions and the new concepts brought by the Lisbon treaty should be revised”, explained the Spanish minister for the Environment.