The Political Economy of the European Unions Emissions Trading System

Auteur
Andriana Vlachou, Department of Economics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece

Résumé

Climate change is considered the major international environmental problem of our time. Emission trading was incorporated in the Kyoto Protocol and is widely presented as the best instrument for combating global warming. The European Union's Emissions Trading System was the first such trading scheme launched and has become the flagship of the EU's efforts to fight climate change.

This book analyses the rationale and the basic design of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme. It also discusses its workings during the first two trading periods (2005-2007, 2008-2012) and the initiation of the third phase (2013-2020), following a revision of the scheme. The book offers a critical assessment of the EU ETS from a radical political economy standpoint, challenging mainstream accounts. The analysis reveals the limited environmental effectiveness and distributional injustice of the scheme. It concludes that, since these pitfalls are generated from the nature of the scheme and its embeddedness in the EU capitalist economies, enduring solutions to climate change require radical transformation of the economy and society, including a new energy structure primarily based on renewable energy.

Contenu

1. Introduction 2. The climate change problem and instruments to mitigate it 3. The basic design of EU ETS and the workings of the first trading period (2005-2007) 4. The second trading period (2008-2012) 5. The revision of EU ETS and the initiation of the third trading period (2013-2020) 6. The EU ETS as applied to a peripheral country: The case of Greece 7. An Assessment of the EU ETS from a critical perspective 8. Conclusions and way forward