News
New publication on the EU's climate change policy and its position in the world
December 10, 2008. In the run up to the high-level segment of the UN Climate Summit in Poznán and the EU Summit in Brussels, a new paper, co-authored by CESP Fellow Louise van Schaik, discusses the EU's international climate change position and its relations with domestic climate change policies.
Issues discussed are the role of the emissions trading scheme in the international carbon market; the potential use of trade measures by the EU, when trading partners do not take up a carbon commitment; and specific design choices of the EU policies with relevance to the international negotiations, such as the new baseline year to measure emission reductions and a distribution of efforts on the basis of the prosperity of member states. The paper moreover discusses how the EU conducts climate negotiations and argues the sophisticated system may not be sustainable when the EU's leadership role in the climate negotiations will come under pressure.
Louise van Schaik and Karel Van Hecke, Skating on Thin Ice: Europe's internal climate policy and its position in the world, Working Paper Egmont Institute, December 2008, 22 pages. Downloadable here.