European Commission’s cost estimates to cut down to 30 per cent emissions by 2020 could be lower, as a staff working paper just released reported.
Thanks to the financial crisis, indeed, raising the ambition of the EU mitigation target has become considerably cheap and affordable. The new draft inflame the debate on the reduction target, a debate that in 2010 was postponed due to the strong resistance of some Central and Eastern countries worried about the higher cost they would sustain compared to other EU countries. The draft tries to put suggestions forward to redistribute the costs of raising to 30 per cent across Member States; one possible solution could be share costs out under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), by cutting the number of carbon allowances rich countries can sell to their industries by 38 per cent. This option will remove about 341 million allowances from higher income Member states’ availability in 2020. This way the auctioning revenue of poorer EU countries will rise by 80 per cent in 2020, the draft estimated. Some Member States strongly support the increase of the European target.
Among them there is Denmark, which has made green economy as one of the top priorities for its presidency of the EU Council of Ministers and that almost surely will push for the approval of this resolution.

Read full stories in the latest issue of Climate Policy News, by Marinella Davide.

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