Life after ETS?

Green groups want the EU to change its approach to cutting emissions.

If the emissions trading scheme (ETS) does become an irrelevancy with no chance of lowering emissions between now and 2020, José Manuel Barroso will be judged to have failed in his stated aim of putting climate change at the top of the agenda during his presidency of the European Commission.

Some environmental campaigners believe that the next president of the Commission should abandon Barroso’s market-based approach and switch to something more direct. Earlier this year, a group of 36 NGOs from around the globe – including some chapters of Friends of the Earth, Corporate Europe Observatory and FERN – released a report calling for the ETS to be scrapped.

“The vote on backloading is the wrong debate,” says Hannah Mowat of FERN, the European forests campaign group. “No amount of structural tinkering will get away from the fact that the European Union has chosen the wrong tool to reduce emissions in Europe.”

The report says that, rather than wasting time and energy fixing a broken system, the EU should instead shift to more direct policies for stimulating changes that lower emissions, such as feed-in tariffs for renewables, redirecting public subsidies away from the fossil-fuel industry and towards low-carbon infrastructure, and improving energy efficiency. Such a change of approach would not be straightforward. The ETS is now almost ten years old and the European Union’s climate policy has been constructed with the ETS at its core.

“I don’t see how [scrapping the ETS] would offer immediate solutions,” said Sam Van Den Plas of campaign group WWF after the report’s release. “That is a process that would require many more years.” He adds that “despite the disappointing news on backloading”, the ETS is still in place. “It’s still a useful policy framework, but the parameters are incorrect.”

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The future of EU climate policy will be one of the challenges facing the next Commission, which takes office  in 2014. It is unclear if structural reform of the ETS will have taken place before the end of the mandate of the Commission and the  European Parliament. If not, the new commissioners and MEPs may decide to start looking at other ways to cut emissions, such as a carbon tax.