The Lisbon Treaty's 6 Words on Climate Change
We have just had one of those surreal debates in the Commons where one side said that the only words in the Lisbon Treaty on climate change, all 6 of them – “and in particular combating climate change” – represented a useful advance since previous EU treaties didn’t mention it at all, whilst the other said it was empty rhetoric amounting to nothing in practice at all. A usual, the real problem is quite different.
The problem is that the EU, despite taking the world lead in tackling climate change, is not delivering. The EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has so far been an abject failure, the regulation of car emissions has been voluntary and therefore ineffective, aircraft emissions have been omitted from any regulatory scheme so that airline emissions are now rising extremely fast, and EU Member States have a burden-sharing arrangement for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in which only 3 of the original EU15 are on track to meet their targets by 2010.
In phase 1 of the ETS more permits to pollute have been issued than there is pollution so that emissions have actually risen, not fallen at all. But now that over-allocation is being stopped, another even bigger loophole is being opened up in phase 2. Member States will be permitted to ‘import’ Kyoto credits from developing countries to meet their carbon reduction targets. The problem is that many of these projects would have gone ahead anyway, so there is no additionality, and the credits will again actually increase pollution.
The Government have admitted that they are allowing for, and indeed expecting, two-thirds of the headline carbon emissions that they have announced as resulting from phase 2 in 2008-10 to occur outside the UK, and outside the EU as well. Worse, other Member States have set even higher import quotas than we have, so they will be able to import more than enough to meet their requirements and then to sell the rest on to the UK, no doubt at a nice profit. So phase 2 of the ETS may well not lead to any cut in emissions in the UK at all.
The truth is that the EU-ETS has been distorted into a massive scam. In phase 1, the power generators made more than £2 billions in windfall profits in the UK alone, by passing on the notional cost of carbon to consumers, even though they had been given permits for free. In phase 2, it is likely that the Kyoto mechanisms will be swamped by a huge over-supply of permits that will again lead to very low carbon prices and therefore little or no effect in cutting emissions.
The problem for the UK is that, despite all the anti-climate change efforts of DEFRA, other Government Departments continue to pursue distinctly pro-climate change policies – the tripling of airport capacity and the huge expansion of Heathrow, the virtual absence of any controls over vehicle emissions, the dropping of the requirement on the UK’s biggest companies to report annually on their plans to cut carbon emissions, the failure to give a lead to the wider population through the introduction of household carbon allowances, the depressingly weak policy on promoting renewables, and most perversely of all the continuing relentless drive to corner the remaining repositories of oil around the world even going so far as annexing 1/3rd million square miles of the sea-bed off Antarctica in hope of mineral and oil deposits.
The Climate Change Bill is fine, but it must be followed up by action in all other Government Departments that is consistent with its goals.
If we are going to lecture other countries at international gatherings about going low-carbon, why do we continue to allow one single power station – Drax in Yorkshire – to emit from a single chimney more CO2 than is emitted by 100 small countries around the world? Why are the Government poised to begin a new round of coal-fired generation, the most polluting form of energy? And if the proposed new Kingsnorth coal-fired plant in Kent was originally justified on the grounds that it offered the opportunity for a breakthrough demonstration carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, why is the Government now moving away from this conditional requirement?
Comments
A magnificient and very accurate statement about the true state of affairs in Europe and its emissions trading system. When you look at what is happening the EU's and the UK government's rhetoric does not match the reality
Unfortunately there is quite enough in the early experience of voluntary carbon markets - the sorts of schemes called "offsetting" to promote "carbon neutrality" - and also in the early experience of the European Emissions Trading scheme to justify suspicion. What you say fully justifies the suspicion of the ETS and I would argue that there's a general reason to be suspicious of all the different kinds of carbon trading at the moment.
As you say the public are also right to be suspicious of the European Union Scheme - in its first phase did not really succeed in reducing carbon emissions in Europe; it is so complicated that most people and politicians do not understand it and, for a time, was seen to be giving rise to windfall profits to big power companies.
The second point I want to make is that it matters a great deal where you enforce your control of carbon emissions. One really ought to control emissions, in the jargon, "upstream". Unfortunately most current schemes, and also most proposed schemes to extend current arrangements, are what are called "downstream systems".
My third point concerns ownership rights - the question - who owns the Sky? For what I have not talked about is to whom and how should the permits be issued? Permits are in effect tradeable permissions to use the sky as a greenhouse gas dump. Up to now the right to use the earth's atmosphere in this way has not required anyone's permission. It has been free - now we are restricting that right so that it becomes valuable in the sense that companies and people will be prepared to pay money for it.
Posted by: Brian Davey | March 11, 2008 02:25 PM