Tuesday’s vote [by the European parliament] has provoked much soul searching about the bloc’s devotion to an issue that once topped its agenda and shaped its self-image. These days, it is accepted that global warming has been consigned to a seat in the waiting room while the EU tends to a chronic economic crisis that has threatened the single currency and increased unemployment. Tuesday’s vote is only the latest evidence of how a crisis-hit continent’s appetite for climate change policies appears to have faded in recent months. --Joshua Chaffin, Pilita Clark and Neil Hume,
Financial Times, 18 April 2013 [Registration Required]
UK industrialists have warned they face “catastrophic” problems after the European Parliament voted down a plan to raise the cost of carbon pollution across the EU. Tuesday’s vote means prices in the EU emissions trading system, the world’s largest carbon market, are likely to stay at about €3 a tonne for at least the next seven years, analysts say. This could disadvantage British companies because the UK has just introduced a separate “carbon price floor” to make sure its industries pay a set amount for carbon pollution. The new tax starts at £16 per tonne of carbon emitted this year, rising to £30 by 2020. The risk is that companies will move their new investment, and possibly some of their current processes, to locations with more favourable energy prices and carbon taxes. --Pilita Clark and Chris Tighe, Financial Times, 18 April 2013
One of the great policy bubbles of our times has been cap and trade for carbon emissions, and on Tuesday it may have popped for good. The European Parliament refused to save the EU’s failing program, which is the true-believer equivalent of the pope renouncing celibacy. With the U.S. shale fracking revolution, it’s now clear that the fastest way to reduce greenhouse gases is to let private drillers expand natural gas production. When even Europe recognizes the folly of artificially raising energy prices, the anticarbon obsessives have lost in their own climate-change temple. --Editorial,
The Wall Street Journal, 18 April 2013
Europe is lurching through an energy crisis that in many respects parallels its seemingly unending economic crisis. Across Europe, consumer groups, governments and manufacturers are asking how their future energy needs can be met affordably and responsibly. Europe’s energy policies were conceived in a very different era, the early to mid-2000s and even before, when economic growth was robust and there seemed to be lots of leeway to add a few euros onto the cost of electricity, if that might help combat climate change. European energy policy makers do not seem to have figured out that the world has changed. --Stanley Reed,
The New York Times, 17 April 2013
In Britain, climate charges add 19 percent to the electricity prices that large manufacturers pay, according to Jeremy Nicholson, director of the Energy Intensive Users Group, which represents heavy industry. That helps make industrial processes that are heavy users of electricity, like aluminum smelting or steel making, endangered species in Britain. --Stanley Reed,
The New York Times, 17 April 2013
It's been a bad week for efforts to develop green energy around the world. A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) says that progress towards carbon-free energy production has basically stalled. "Despite much talk by world leaders," said IEA executive director, Maria van der Hoeven, "and despite a boom in renewable energy over the last decade, the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago." --Matt McGrath,
BBC News, 18 April 2013
A COLLAPSE in the European carbon price will burn a hole in [the Australian government's] budget, with the government scrambling to remodel and downgrade its forecasted price in 2015. News of the writedown came as the European price sank below $4 after measures to prop it up failed in the European Parliament. Opposition treasury spokesman Joe Hockey claimed the hit to the budget could be as high as $7 billion a year. Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry Chief economist Greg Evans said the collapse in the European price showed the scale of the “economic recklessness of imposing a carbon tax of $23 per tonne on Australian industry and consumers” --Gemma Jones,
The Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2013
