Two Decades of European Climate Policy: A Critical Appraisal

Christoph Böhringer

No 21 / 2013, ZenTra Working Papers in Transnational Studies from ZenTra - Center for Transnational Studies

Abstract: Climate change ranks high on the policy agenda of the European Union (EU) which considers itself as a leading force in the battle against anthropogenic climate change. The EU is committed to the objective of limiting the rise in global average temperature to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. This article provides a critical appraisal of two decades of EU climate policy. Based on the global nature of climate change, we pre-sent three criteria for sound unilateral action and evaluate current EU climate policy against these criteria. We find that the actual implementation of EU climate policies is likely to make emission abatement much more costly than necessary.

Keywords: EU climate policy; emission regulation; cost-effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H21 H23 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2013-11, Revised 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2361349 First version, 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Two Decades of European Climate Policy: A Critical Appraisal (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zen:wpaper:21

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZenTra Working Papers in Transnational Studies from ZenTra - Center for Transnational Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Finn Marten Koerner ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).