The European Union’s planned measure to delay some carbon auctions is a short-term tool to tackle oversupply and will be followed by talks on further steps to bolster the bloc’s climate policies, the EU climate chief said.
The European Commission is planning to present to member states “in the not-too-distant future” a review of the EU carbon-permit auctioning regulation to postpone some sales of allowances from 2013, Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said. That could help boost prices in the European emissions market after they sank to a record last month.
“That’s basically backloading; it’s a question of how many allowances will come to the market and when,” Hedegaard said today in a Brussels interview. “Then there’s another discussion, when many CEOs from huge European corporations start saying that we also need to take away more permanently some of the allowances from the market. That discussion will come later.”
European governments and the commission, the EU regulatory arm, have come under pressure from companies including Germany’s largest utility, EON AG, and the region’s biggest oil company, Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA), to improve the bloc’s carbon market after a recession cut industrial output and pollution prices slumped to a record this year on oversupply.
Environment lobbies and some members of the European Parliament have also urged the EU to fix its carbon cap-and- trade program by creating a set-aside of allowances that would be subsequently canceled at the end of the next trading period in 2020.
EU’s soldier in skirts in action. She believes in ideology as reality is over her horizon.