EU Climate Policy After The Crash Of 09
European Business Review, October 2010
By Gwyn Prins
It is now plain that something has gone badly awry with the European Union’s policies and views on the issue of climate change. Plain to any observer, it seems, other than the EU Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard, and her colleagues inside the shiny towers of the Brussels quartier européen. They continue to assert in a triumph of hope over experience that it will all come good with more of the same polices that have just failed.
The EU Emissions Trading Scheme and associated promotion of so-called “cap and trade” carbon trading has crashed and is burning. The carbon price had already crashed twice before the present time.That isn’t to say that nothing is happening: much is. A false market in the non-emission of carbon has been created by fiat and is having a dampening effect on already fragile EU economic recovery. But it is fertilising a luxuriant undergrowth of consultants and ‘carbon traders’, rather in the way that speculators in other classic ‘bubble’ markets have been enriched in the past.
