The week’s parliamentary session in Strasbourg had the usual mix of the sublime, the ridiculous and a dash of unexpected drama. Above it all hung the usual question of what we were doing here by the sunsoaked Rhine. That was given added spice by the revelation by the Green party that the monthly commute to the French city gives off as much carbon as a small island state about to be drowned by global warming.

The drama came on Wednesday when Bronislaw Geremek, the Polish former dissident who has become the conscience of the parliament in the last few years. His refusal to sign a further declaration that he had not collaborated with Communist secret police draw a rare standing ovation. Party leaders rallied to his defence denouncing witch hunts and Stalinism. His 53 Polish colleagues, who have signed the declaratons, were noticeably quieter - except those from the ruling Law and Justice party who howled because the deputy speaker stopped them answering the charges. They - like Geremek - are desperate not to be seen as Euro-quislings. If he has his mandate revoked; the ex-foreign minister said, he could return to Poland and have direct contact with the people, continuing his fight at home. That day also saw a climactic vote to allow medicines derived from embryonic stem cell research on to the market, after a debate that pitched liberals against moral conservatives.

There also was interesting news for air travellers.

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Not only is the European parliament’s commute to Strasbourg burning 200m euros of taxpayers’ money a year. It is also burning at least 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, a report published by the Green party on Wednesday showed.

The 785 MEPs and their baggage train spend one week a month in the French city in a spirit of European solidarity. The first serious research into their carbon footprint is released to coincide with the setting up of a temporary committee on climate change.

Claude Turmes, a ponytailed Green from Luxembourg, said MEPs take chauffeur-driven limousines from office to restaurant and yet have called on Europe to cut emissions by 25 per cent between 1990 and 2020. “This is exactly what citizens detest in politicians: saying one thing and doing another.”

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Even in this age of putting a price on hot air, words come cheaper than carbon emissions. So not a few MEPs are unimpressed by a resolution on climate change to be approved on Wednesday.

This resolution calling for political leadership comes while the full parliament sits in Strasbourg, having been followed there by a convoy of lorries carrying documents and other essentials from Brussels and Luxembourg, its other seats.

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Joseph Daul is an unlikely revolutionary. The Strasbourg farmer who was elected narrowly on Tuesday night as the head of the centre-right European People’s party looks like a throwback to the early founders of Europe among past holders of the post.

Judging from the rogues gallery on the EPP’s website the last innovation by its leadership was Egon Klepsch’s radical decision in 1977 to dispense with the obligatory pocket handkerchief.

Yet Daul, 59, called himself one of the ‘68 generation and his measured response to the yawning split revealed by the election suggests he could chart a delicate path forward.

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Democracy is slowly coming to the European parliament. It’s hard to tell whether that, or the formation of a far-right group, is more shocking for the mainstream MEPs who provide most of the voting fodder.

One can deride the 20 or so MEPs from six countries who are set to form a new caucus on Wednesday that would give them speaking rights in parliament. A motley crew, ranging from holocaust deniers to gypsy-baiters, most people wouldn’t want to sit next to them on a bus never mind in a parliament. But they don’t particularly like each other any more than most like them.

It’s the EU’s expansion to Romania and Bulgaria on January 1^st that has made the far-right nightmare, long talked-about in Strasbourg, close to coming true. Veterans like Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front now have allies in the requisite five European countries to form a group. Bulgaria’s anti-Roma Ataka party and the nationalist Great Romania party of Corneliu Vadim Tudor are set to join what could be known, evocatively, as "Europe of the Fatherlands" or "Identity, Sovereignty, Tradition".

But they would not even be talking to each other if it were not for the consensus-cloying way the parliament works.

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