The Origin, Evolution and Consequences of the EU Emissions Trading System

Jon Birger Skjærseth and Jørgen Wettestad
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Jon Birger Skjærseth: Jon Birger Skjærseth is a Senior Research Fellow at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute. His research interests are international environmental cooperation, EU environmental policy, national environmental policy and the strategies of multinational companies, particularly in the fields of climate policy and marine pollution. He has published numerous books and articles in these fields, such as the following books: EU Emissions Trading: Initiation, Decision-making and Implementation (2008, with Jørgen Wettestad); International Regimes and Norway's Environmental Policy: Crossfire and Coherence (2004); Climate Change and the Oil Industry: Common Problem, Varying Strategies (2003, with Tora Skodvin) and North Sea Cooperation: Linking International and Domestic Pollution Control (2000).
Jørgen Wettestad: Jørgen Wettestad is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of European Programme at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo, Norway. His main research interests include EU energy and climate policy, the functioning and effectiveness of international environmental regimes, and domestic air pollution and climate politics. His most recent book is (together with Jon B. Skjærseth) EU Emissions Trading: Initiation, Decision-making and Implementation (2008). Other books include Clearing the Air: European Advances in Tackling Acid Rain and Atmospheric Pollution (2002), and with E. L. Miles, A. Underdal, S. Andresen, J. B. Skjærseth, and E. M. Carlin, Environmental Regime Effectiveness-Confronting Theory with Evidence (2002).

Global Environmental Politics, 2009, vol. 9, issue 2, 101-122

Abstract: The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is the cornerstone of EU climate policy, a grand policy experiment, as the first and largest international emissions trading system in the world. In this article, we seek to provide a broad overview of the initiation, decision-making and implementation of the EU ETS so far. We explore why the EU changed from a laggard to a leader in emissions trading, how it managed to establish the system rapidly, and the consequences to date, leading up to the 2008 proposal for a revised ET Directive for the post-2012 period. We apply three explanatory approaches, focusing on the roles of the EU member states, the EU institutions and the international climate regime, and conclude that all three approaches are needed to understand what happened, how and why. This also reveals that what happened in the early days of developing the system had significant consequences for the problems experienced in practice and the prospects ahead. (c) 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2009
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