how the EU can make emission caps effective

The previous post made mention of the summit taking place this week in the European Union to create a comprehensive cap-and-trade package for member countries. According to a news story yesterday in Reuters, the EU sees more value (in terms of preventing anthropogenic climate change) in a cap-and-trade system than in offsetting carbon emissions:

"If developing countries continue to be only offset suppliers we simply will not reach (desired) emissions levels," the Commission's Head of Emissions Trading, Yvon Slingenberg, told a carbon market conference in Copenhagen."We need a re-think. (Emissions cuts) would become more the contributions of developing nations," she told reporters. "(We want) a gradual shift from offsetting to cap and trade."

Aside from serious implications for the growing carbon market, the shift from carbon offsets to cap and trade still calls for control on leakage, as outlined in the previous post on this blog. The primary goal of the EU is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to slow and ultimately stop climate change (global warming). However, it is no less important to minimize the potential problems of leakage and reduced competitiveness of EU industries. To these ends, the summit this week will seek ways to globalize the impacts of their program.

According to The Canadian Press, one of the ways in which this will be accomplished is for EU countries to impose trade and other sanctions on both industrializing and industrialized countries who refuse to sign on to a new international accord to cut greenhouse gas emissions (the new Kyoto). Wake up, U.S.A., they mean us. The United States has traditionally been a world leader in matters of stewardship for human rights and security, but in the case of human-induced climate change (perhaps the #1 threat to global security), we have done nothing but drag our feet, arguing about the validity of the science to buy time for inaction. I applaud the European Union, and I hope they are not afraid to stand up to us in order to finally get us to change our ways. Through the use of sanctions, the EU will not only solve the problems of leakage and competitiveness, but it may also succeed in spurring the U.S., China, and other emissions giants into reducing their output of greenhouse gases.