A wind farm in India; a methane-capture scheme for pig farms in Brazil; a forestry project in Indonesia; equipment to capture industrial gases in China the ETS can finance them all.Although it is still young, the ETS has had some impact on emissions.
Yet the ETS was intended to cut European emissions as well as Chinese ones.This is happening on a small scale.
He has not done the sums since last November, when the European Commission chucked out Germany's "transfer rule" (which would have exempted new coal-fired stations from the ETS for 14 years), but reckons the break-even point will have come down to more like €25.That helped raise the carbon price.
The European Commission linked the ETS to the "clean-development mechanism" (CDM) set up under the Kyoto protocol.
Europe's ETS made up about 80% of the total value.Developing-country CERs accounted for about €4 billion of last year's trade: 562m tonnes of CO2.
Such "certified emissions reductions" (CER) can then be sold.The demand for carbon credits comes mostly from within the ETS, from polluters who need certificates allowing them to emit carbon.
Europe's emissions-trading system (ETS) is, in effect, that sort of a tax.
The ETS is the only EU-wide environmental instrument.
You rightly conclude that, given the limits of technical and operating fixes, taxes and trading are essential but that simply adding aviation to the European Union's existing emissions-trading scheme (ETS) is not the solution.
Of the 65% of companies surveyed by Point Carbon earlier this year which claimed that the ETS had led them to abate their emissions (up from 15% the previous year), most were planning to buy credits rather than cut their own emissions.
But that burden may be short-lived, as Ms Hedegaard says that the EU could stilll bring foreign carriers back into the ETS.
