For the first ten years of its existence, the European Union’s carbon-trading market was widely considered a failure. An overly generous free allowance system combined with the financial crisis’s slowdown in economic activity drove the price of carbon in the Emission Trading Scheme to levels far too low to discourage emissions.
In 2015, a controversial intervention by EU lawmakers fixed the problem with legislation that made the price go up. But now as a result of the sudden halt of economic activity due to Coronavirus and the drop in gas and oil prices, the price is plummeting again, already sinking to levels not seen since November 2018. The price is certain to continue falling.
The difficulty is just one example of the wider problem the EU is now facing in maintaining its climate change framework in the face of Coronavirus.
The EU’s Green Deal, with its target to completely decarbonise by 2050 proposed earlier this month, has not taken the massive economic and social disruption of Coronavirus into account. Assumptions made just a few weeks ago will now have to be completely revised. There is particular urgency to revise the EU’s medium-term goal of reducing emissions by 40% by 2030, adopted in 2014.
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Máximo Miccinilli, Energy Director at the Center on Regulation in Europe (CERRE), says this 2030 strategy is the “most exposed element” of EU climate policy to Coronavirus risks, after the ETS.
“The European Commission’s climate plan aims at defining mandatory trajectories over the next three decades.” he says. “There is, however, an urgent need for including in the modelling exercise the implications of a global sanitary-economic crisis of the magnitude of COVID-19.”
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He says the Commission must define “new scenarios that include lower industrial outputs, crises in strategic sectors - e.g. aviation, automobile, tourism, etcetera - lower carbon prices and other fundamental, socio-demographic developments which would result from a potential five-year long recession.”
This should be in addition to urgent measures taken to adjust the ETS, he says.
Climate campaigners have argued that economic recovery measures that don’t take the Green Deal into account risk destroying Europe’s chances of meeting the Paris Agreement goals. As the EU and national governments flood the economy with unprecedented bailout funding, much of that funding will go to emissions-intensive sectors like aviation and industry. And politicians that have been sceptical about EU climate action are already saying the outbreak means that efforts to tackle climate change should be suspended, while industry is propped up.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš said last week that the EU should “forget about” the Green Deal for now while it focuses on Coronavirus. This was backed by Jan Zahradil, the conservative vice chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on International Trade, who said the crisis means climate plans should be reconsidered. “No post-virus economy in Europe will be able to handle it, it’s too expensive,” he said on Twitter.
Poland's Deputy Minister of State Assets Janusz Kowalski said last week the ETS should be shut down entirely to allow an increase in coal power generation to lower power prices.
Other conservative lawmakers have already called on the European Commission to delay or weaken new carbon dioxide emissions standards for cars, to protect the automotive industry.
The industry itself hasn’t yet called for such a suspension, but Eric-Mark Huitema, the director of European automotive industry association ACEA, said last week that the current situation is “the worst crisis ever to impact the automotive industry”.
“With all manufacturing coming to a standstill and the retail network effectively closed, the jobs of some 14 million Europeans are now at stake,” he said.
The idea of such unrestrained bailouts to polluting industries is horrifying climate campaigners, who fear that years of work putting in place a framework to lower European emissions is about to be undone in a matter of weeks. They stress that it doesn’t have to be this way.
The European Commission says that reaching the 2030 emissions reduction target will require at least €260 billion of additional investments each year. The European Central Bank’s €750 billion stimulus package announced last week could cover that several times over. French President Emmanuel Macron has said that stimulus, if used in a way thats compatible with the Green Deal, could tackle both the Coronavirus crisis and the climate crisis at the same time.
"We need to make sure that we do not delay the green deal because of the coronavirus response,” says Pascal Canfin, the chair of the European Parliament’s Environment and Public Health committee and a close ally of Macron. He says this new public money designed to prevent or alleviate a recession “has to be seen as an opportunity to speed up the response to the climate crisis and green deal, instead of delaying it.”
Others have argued that the virus is going to tackle climate change on its own, by forcing a slowdown in global economic growth. Thus, policymakers can take a break for a while on climate measures because they have been given some breathing space. But Canfin says he doesn’t agree with this idea.
"I don’t buy that. This kind of short term brutal slowdown is definitely not sustainable from a social and financial perspective. The idea of the green deal is not to shut down activities. It’s to transition from carbon intensive activities to carbon free activities. It’s not closing the shop, it’s having a shop selling sustainable goods."
Much remains uncertain as the effects of the Coronavirus ravage economies. But what seems clear is that any assumptions made about transitioning to the green economy have now been rendered obsolete. A new green new deal may be needed.
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