No.185 Seminar ： HEALING THE ACHILLES HEEL! OR: HOW TO REDUCE TRANSPORT FUEL EMISSIONS SUSTAINABLY. Lessons from California for Germany’s New Fuels Emissions Trading Scheme.
- Associate Professor Sven RUDOLPH（Hakubi 9th batch,Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies）
- 2020/09/15 4:30pm
- ZOOM (Closed)
- English
Summary
Emissions from the transport sectors remain to be the Achille’s Heel of climate policy. In spite of emissions reductions in industry and power generation in climate pioneer jurisdictions such as California and Germany, transport sector emissions have not been significantly reduced. So how can this Achilles Heel of modern climate policy be cured? Theory and practice of treating transport sector carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have mainly focused on regulatory (e.g. low carbon fuel standards), subsidy (e.g. tax credits for electric vehicles), of tax approach (e.g. carbon taxes). However, California has been using an emission trading scheme (ETS) for the transport sector since 2015, and Germany is going to implement its own Fuels ETS (F-ETS) next year. Against this background, we briefly introduce the general concept of emissions trading, before describing the design of both the Californian and the German approach to including transport sector emissions in ETS. We then comparatively evaluate the designs based on a set of ambitious sustainability criteria developed by Rudolph et al. (2012) and analyze the (expected) results. We base our policy analysis on well-established sustainability economics’, namely environmental effectiveness, social justice, and economic efficiency. We mainly conclude that ETS can be used for sustainably limiting transport sector emissions, but the respective design has to reflect the specifics of the sector. We also show that, while already being an ambitious approach, Germany’s new program could greatly benefit from three major program revisions. The paper thus provides an immediately applicable framework for designing and evaluating transport sector climate policy and an overview of the current status quo of transport fuels ETS implementation in two climate pioneer jurisdictions.