刊行物
｜ ENGLISH ｜
RUDOLPH, Sven
Hundreds of thousands of people dead, entire economies devastated, and no global cure in sight. This is not (only) COVID-19 2020, this might be Climate Change 2050. And while the COVID-19 pandemic has depressed 2020 global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to the 2006 level, the atmospheric concentration of the most important greenhouse gas (GHG) reached a historical peak in 2020.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the major global research body on the subject, global climate change has accelerated beyond expectations. Some dramatic consequences are already visible today around the world, such as the devastating bushfires in Australia early this year. Reaching the goals of the 2017 Paris Agreement, the first really global climate treaty, is hence paramount for securing a livable future for humankind.
The climate policy tool box, though enormous in size and sophistication, has so far not been sufficiently used to solve the climate crisis. Over the decades, instruments reaching from energy standards and renewable energy subsidies to re- and afforestation projects and climate change education have been developed. In addition, economics has provided market-based approaches such as carbon taxes or emissions trading schemes (ETS). But still, global emissions have kept on rising, and the goal of global net-zero emissions by 2050 is way out of sight. Hence, ambitions have to be significantly stepped up. And we have only 10 years left!
One particularly promising instrument of climate policy is emissions trading, or better, cap-and-trade (CaT). Cap-and-trade puts on overall total limit (cap) on GHG emission in a jurisdiction, then hands out emissions allowances each worth one ton of emission in a given year to prospective emitters, and obliges polluters to cover all emissions by the respective number of emission allowances; in addition, transferring allowances amongst polluters (trade) is permitted. Economic research has shown that the cap guarantees that overall emissions stay below thepre-determined limit, while trading minimizes societal costs of achieving the target. Applied in air pollution control, e.g. the US halved SO2 emissions in the 1990 at 50% the costs of a traditional regulatory approach. Cap-and-trade has thus proven itself to be a valuable environmental policy instrument.
And the use of cap-and-trade, here termed carbon markets, has also been spreading in climate policy both across the globe, from Europe to North America to Oceania to Northeast Asia, and across governance levels from supra-national (EU) to local (Tokyo). At the beginning, most of the schemes tended to be unambitious and poorly designed. However, 2020/21 sees major reforms: The EU ETS, the California- Quebec CaT, the US Northeast Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), and the Tokyo-Saitama CaT significantly tighten their caps; South Korea sells a bigger share of its allowances instead of handing them out for free; the New Zealand ETS for the first time implements a real cap, and China goes from local pilot schemes to a nationwide program. In addition, new cap-and-trade programs are emerging in Mexico, Virginia, and Germany.
However, still only a minor share of global GHG emissions is covered by cap-and-trade and the existing and planned schemes are far from being sustainable: Their emission caps are not stringent enough, they do not fully exploit the cost-saving potential of trading, and they do not sufficiently take into consideration detrimental distributional effects. Hence, in international and interdisciplinary collaboration, my Hakubi Project ToPCaPS (Towards a Trans-Pacific Carbon Market – Politically Feasible and Sustainable) aims at developing a joint cap-and-trade model for the Pacific region, covering major emitters in Northeast Asia, Oceania, and North America. By designing a truly sustainable and politically feasible scheme, I hope my research will become an important component of the urgently needed cure for the climate crisis.
（スヴェン ルドルフ）
