Letter from Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy MEP (ALDE, Netherlands) to National Parliamentarians in Europe:

Dear Colleagues,

Let me start by thanking you for your efforts to make our economies more sustainable. It is one of the main challenges of the near future to make the serious transitions towards sustainability happen.

One of the most effective ways of doing this is by phasing out those subsidies that have a negative effect on this transition, the so-called environmentally harmful subsidies (EHS). They cost us, and the tax payer double: we first pay the subsidy and secondly we have to pay to resolve the negative environmental consequence.

Within the European Union we spent a huge amount of money on EHS. The most common examples are subsidies on fisheries and for fossil fuels. On fisheries we spend more than 3.3 billion Euro whereas 40% of the European fleet still operates at a net loss. On transport we spend 293 billion Euro subsidies in the EU in 2005 (excluding harmful costs such as environmental and climate damages, estimated on 650 billion Euro), whereas the total tax revenue of the transport sector was only 200 million Euro.

I strongly believe this money can be spent more wisely. Especially in these times of austerity, where governments are desperate in finding funds. Although, attention has been given to EHS, we do not have an overview on how much each Member State spends on these subsidies. A first step would therefore be to map all EHS in Member States.

Therefore, I would like to ask your cooperation to by posing a parliamentary question to your government. To assist you, I have drawn up to following example:

"Is the government aware of the adverse effect of environmentally harmful subsidies? Is the government aware the European Union and its Member States have made the commitment to phase out environmentally harmful subsidies by 2020 within the framework of the Nagoya summit on biodiversity, the G-20 Pittsburgh summit and the Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe of the European Commission (20 September 2011)? Can the government provide an overview of the existing environmentally harmful subsidies? And can the government indicate how it intends to phase out the identified environmentally harmful subsidies and within which timeframe?"

In order to give sufficient attention to the fact that we parliamentarians work together on this issue, I propose to table the questions simultaneously on 18 October 2011, exactly one year after the Nagoya summit. If you would like to participate, please let me know so I can mention your name in the press release. Obviously, you are more than welcome to use this opportunity for your own media as well.

It is of the utmost importance that we urge our governments to phase out EHS as soon as possible, both for our taxpayers and economies as well as for the environment. I would appreciate it very much if you could stay in contact with Rafael Jiménez-Aybar of the GLOBE Secretariat for Europe ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) with regards to your findings. That way we can also push for the eradication of EHS on the European level.

Yours truly,

Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy MEP

Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE)