Once a month before dawn on a Saturday, an unlikely convoy pulls up by the soaring glass-and-steel complex of Europe's Parliament: half a dozen trucks crammed with documents for the assembly's monthly four-day session.
Once a month before dawn on a Saturday, an unlikely convoy pulls up by the soaring glass-and-steel complex of Europe's Parliament: half a dozen trucks crammed with documents for the assembly's monthly four-day session.Some 3,000 parliamentarians, officials, lobbyists, journalists and hangers-on descend on Strasbourg for every plenary session, filling every hotel room in the picturesque provincial city of 270,000. The exorbitant and complicated to-and-fro is a result of an EU treaty accommodating the demands of France to house an EU institution.
The commute - by plane, train or automobile - continues even as EU leaders agree that the 27-nation bloc must take the lead in the fight against climate change. Road transport alone accounts for about one-fifth of the EU's carbon dioxide emissions. A study commissioned by the EU's Greens shows that the monthly trek produces over 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, the equivalent of 13,000 return flights from London to New York.
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