Carbon trading

Brexit is an opportunity to improve upon the EU ETS, the EU’s climate flagship which has been consistently failing to reduce emissions while being a paradise for corporate lobbying.

The European Parliament voted on the reform of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) on 15 February, agreeing to weak annual climate targets and massive new handouts to polluters for another decade.

The reform of the EU Emissions Trading System could hand more than €230 billion in subsidies to energy intensive industries, a new report from Corporate Europe Observatory shows.

Subsidies raised through the Emissions Trading System, the EU’s flagship policy to reduce climate change, could be the key to ensuring that two new coal-fired power stations are built in Greece, according to a recent report in The Guardian newspaper. Wait - what!?

The International Civil Aviation Organization is expected to agree a new climate deal at its current assembly meeting. But its promise of “carbon neutral” flying through voluntary carbon offsetting is delusive, posing new threats to the environment and communities.

A new report on carbon market reform has kicked off debate on the issue in the European Parliament. It promises new loopholes for the oil industry and other polluters.

A revised Emissions Trading Directive is like red meat for the hungry pack of lobbyists that work the corridors of Brussels’ political institutions. Even minor differences in how pollution permits are handed out can result in profits or savings of millions of euros to big polluters.

The Emissions Trading System (ETS) is the European Union’s flagship climate policy. It is intended to establish a legal limit (or “cap”) on carbon dioxide emissions (and more recently, those of other greenhouse gases) by making it expensive to pollute beyond this limit.

There is something zombie-like about the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), the world's largest carbon market, which has consistently failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, only to be brought back from the dead by successive “reform” proposals. The latest attempt to reincarnate the EU's flagship climate policy, proposed by the European Commission last July, would extend the scheme until at least 2030.

Every time the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) fails to reduce emissions, the politicians and businesses who promote the scheme reach for their Samuel Beckett: “Try again, fail again, fail better.”

What would fill the void if the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) were allowed to collapse? This briefing shows that ending the ETS would not leave a climate policy void.

The report "EU ETS myth busting" has been co-published by more than 40 organisations, including Corporate Europe Observatory. It shows that far from being the ‘best tool’ to combat climate change, the EU ETS is inherently too weak to drive the sustainable energy transformation the EU needs in order to stay within global warming limits. It is systemically flawed and cannot be fixed.