Klimapolitik: Kyoto-Protokoll und Emissionshandel für CO₂-Zertifikate in der EU

Abstract

Economists like trading systems: Efficiency gains can best be realized with flexible mechanisms. Also every economist knows that the institutional conditions and the rules of the game are important. This basic idea stood behind the introduction of a CO2-emissions trading system within the European Community starting in 2005. Since the starting point is the Kyoto-protocol with its subset of relevant states involved and the rules agreed upon there, one must ask whether the EU CO2-trading system is really an instrument that helps to reach the Kyoto goals more efficiently. A positive answer to this question is very doubtful. The new European subsystem is only valid for CO2 while Kyoto knows six greenhouse gases, the EU trading periods are 2005-2007 and 2008-2012 while Kyoto is only relevant for the second period, the integration with all flexible instruments of Kyoto is not guaranteed from the beginning. The plants involved are power plants and plants with high energy intensity. Since the technological levels of these plants are rather similar in Europe, the difference in marginal abatement cost will not be large enough to offset the rather high transaction cost of the special EU system. Furthermore, the heating systems and small scale plants of industry are not included in the trading system. The same holds true for traffic, households and the service sector. Drawing a borderline between CO2-policy there and the trading activities will cause inefficiencies. If CO2-prices are high, the main incentive of the trading system will be a large shift from domestic production to production abroad without any CO2-restrictions. Leakage-effects will then be dominant. With low CO2-prices the special European bureaucratic system will not create enough efficiency gains to cover the trading system’s cost.