On Thursday, the ministry will hold a meeting with national park directors about cuts, said Turek

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The Ministry of the Environment will hold a meeting with the directors of all four national parks in the Czech Republic on Thursday. The subject will be financing, said Filip Turek, the government's climate commissioner (for Motorists), in an interview on ČT24 moderated by Barbora Kroužková. He also spoke to the new Minister of the Environment, Igor Červený (Motorists). "We have a similar view of the world, of environmental protection and of industry, so from the position of the government's climate commissioner and the Green Deal, I am satisfied with our cooperation," he said.

Turek believes that when it comes to industry, he and the new Minister Červený will speak with one voice. "As the Commissioner for Climate Policy and the Green Deal, I am the one who is more responsible for energy and industry, which is damaged by climate policy," said the MP, according to whom the Ministry of the Environment is a department related to energy and industry. According to Turek, only a rich industrial country can be ecologically responsible and can afford expensive things such as environmental protection.

Turek apparently agrees with Červený that climate change is happening and that humanity is contributing to it. "I'm just saying that a person who lives in Europe and the Czech Republic does not have that much influence on the fact that climate change is happening (...). And it certainly does not make sense to cut our own industry and energy in order to buy products from Asia, which produces two to three times more emissions during the same production," the government representative thinks.

According to Turek, climate change is largely related to the energy and industrial concept. "From our point of view, climate change as such is something that a person living in the Czech Republic cannot influence, and therefore has to adapt to it," claims the MP, who repeated several times during the part of the interview related to climate change that he is "not a scientist."

"We are fully aware that climate change is occurring and that humanity is contributing to it. The European Union contributes approximately 5.6 percent to global carbon dioxide emissions, the Czech Republic approximately 0.34 percent," Červený said on Monday.

Negotiations with national park directors

Turek also announced on the show that negotiations will take place with the directors of all four national parks on Thursday. They are to have their operating funds reduced and they are to be laid off due to budget cuts in the Ministry of the Environment. Last week, the Krkonoše National Park Administration (KRNAP) drew attention to a letter from the founder, which is the Ministry of the Environment. He informed it of the Ministry of Finance's proposal to reduce the number of jobs by fourteen from the current 238. The cuts in the operation of national parks are criticized by ecologists, who reject Motorists at the head of the ministry.

"We are doing our best to ensure that (national parks) do not lose any operating money that they need. We just want some effective financial management to take place here. This means that if they can have money that is in their reserves, it is better for the taxpayer to make them use this money, and not to use money that the state borrows. If this money runs out, of course the state will help the parks to continue operating," emphasized Turek, according to whom the parks have over 726 million crowns in reserves.

"National parks have large reserves of hundreds of millions from previous periods. If the Ministry of the Environment sends them even more money, it increases their financial reserve, which is completely unnecessary in a period when we have to behave financially sustainably," Červený said earlier.

Dispute with the president? "The wiser one will step aside," said the Turek

Turek also returned to the dispute between the Motorists and President Petr Pavel, who refused to appoint Turek as Minister of the Environment, among other things, because of some of his positions and statements. The MP and honorary president of the Motorists has long faced criticism for racist and homophobic posts on social networks. He apologized for some of the statements, while denying authorship of others.

Turek recalled that according to the original plans, he was to become the foreign minister. In the end, the chairman of the Motorists, Petr Macinka, became this person, whose party originally wanted to nominate him to head the environment ministry. "The big concession from the Castle was that we exchanged with Petr Macinka. That we backed away from the concept that I would be the foreign minister. It was an unwritten agreement with the president. He has not kept it again," said Turek. However, moderator Kroužková noted that Pavel did not confirm the existence of this agreement.

After President Turek refused to appoint him, the Motorists announced that they would not nominate another candidate to head the Ministry of the Environment. Why did they change their mind? "The wiser one will step aside," said Turek, according to whom the party wants the ministries under its leadership to function as well as possible. However, in the long term, he said, it would be possible for Macinka to head two ministries. "But it was annoying for all parties in the media. Nothing else was being discussed and we really want to work," he added.

Reaction to Macinka's speech at the UN General Assembly session

It was the head of Czech diplomacy, Macinka, who on Tuesday, at an extraordinary session of the UN General Assembly on Ukraine, on the fourth anniversary of the full-fledged Russian invasion, sent a message to Moscow that invasion is never legitimate and it is time to end the war.

The Turek is said to agree with Macinka, but he reiterated that the cause of the invasion, in his opinion, is the bad foreign policy of the superpowers and their efforts to expand their spheres of influence. In this context, he also mentioned NATO expansion. "The Russians need eastern Ukraine, for strategic reasons they need Sevastopol ( a port city in the southwest of Crimea, ed. note .), they need access to the unfrozen sea. These are all geopolitical and strategic reasons for Russia. And of course they are afraid of NATO, because historically it had many things that were not purely defensive in nature," he said.

According to him, however, this does not mean that superpowers can go for whatever they want in violation of international law. "I am saying that the superpowers unfortunately behave according to the realistic theory of international relations. And that is not the idealistic one. We would imagine that it would be different, but the superpowers behave according to their realistic possibilities," he said, adding that the Motorists have been saying all along that Russia is the aggressor.

In connection with foreign policy, Turek also spoke about defense spending, which the new cabinet reduced in the budget proposal compared to the proposal of the previous government of Petr Fiala (ODS). According to the government representative, US President Donald Trump only talks on a friendly level with a few politicians, among whom, according to him, is Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (ANO). "And we should take advantage of the situation and start telling the Americans the reality of our economy," Turek added.

But according to the MP, what is most important is real defense capability. "It doesn't matter if you spend two and a half percent stupidly or one and a half percent smartly," he says. Last June, NATO countries agreed that defense spending would increase to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2035, and another 1.5 percent of GDP would be related non-military investments.

Source: ČT24