EU ETS Archives - Page 2 of 2 - An Economic View of the Environment

Two Notable Events Prompt Examination of an Important Property of Cap-and-Trade

In December of 2010, a group of economists and legal scholars gathered at the University of Chicago to celebrate two notable events. One was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ronald Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost” (Coase 1960). The other was Professor Coase’s 100^th birthday. The conference resulted in a special issue of The Journal of Law and Economics, which has just been published (although it is dated November 2011).

My frequent co-author, Robert Hahn (of the University of Oxford), and I were privileged to participate in the conference (a video of our presentation is available here). We recognized that the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Coase’s landmark study provided an opportunity for us to examine one of that study’s key implications, which is of great importance not only for economics but for public policy as well, in particular, for environmental policy.

The Coase Theorem and the Independence Property

In our just-published article, “The Effect of Allowance Allocations on Cap-and-Trade System Performance,” Hahn and I took as our starting point a well-known result from Coase’s work, namely, that bilateral negotiation between the generator and the recipient of an externality will lead to the same efficient outcome regardless of the initial assignment of property rights, in the absence of transaction costs, income effects, and third party impacts. This result, or a variation of it, has come to be known as the Coase Theorem.

We focused on an idea that is closely related to the Coase theorem, namely, that the market equilibrium in a cap-and-trade system will be cost-effective and independent of the initial allocation of tradable rights (typically referred to as permits or allowances). That is, the overall cost of achieving a given emission reduction will be minimized, and the final allocation of permits will be independent of the initial allocation, under certain conditions (conditional upon the permits being allocated freely, i.e., not auctioned). We call this the independence property. It is closely related to a core principle of general equilibrium theory (Arrow and Debreu 1954), namely, that when markets are complete, outcomes remain efficient even after lump-sum transfers among agents.

The Practical Political Importance of the Independence Property

We were interested in the independence property because of its great political importance. The reason why this property is of such great relevance to the practical development of public policy is that it allows equity and efficiency concerns to be separated. In particular, a government can set an overall cap of pollutant emissions (a pollution reduction goal) and leave it up to a legislature to construct a constituency in support of the program by allocating shares of the allowances to various interests, such as sectors and geographic regions, without affecting either the environmental performance of the system or its aggregate social costs. Indeed, this property is a key reason why cap-and-trade systems have been employed and have evolved as the preferred instrument in a variety of environmental policy settings.

In Theory, Does the Property Always Hold?

Because of the importance of this property, we examined the conditions under which it is more or less likely to hold — both in theory and in practice. In short, we found that in theory, a number of factors can lead to the independence property being violated. These are particular types of transaction costs in cap-and-trade markets; significant market power in the allowance market; uncertainty regarding the future price of allowances; conditional allowance allocations, such as output-based updating-allocation mechanisms; non-cost-minimizing behavior by firms; and specific kinds of regulatory treatment of participants in a cap-and-trade market.

In Reality, Has the Property Held?

Of course, the fact that these factors can lead to the violation of the independence property does not mean that in practice they do so in quantitatively significant ways. Therefore, Hahn and I also carried out an empirical assessment of the independence property in past and current cap-and-trade systems: lead trading; chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) under the Montreal Protocol; the sulfur dioxide (SO₂) allowance trading program; the Regional Clean Air Incentives Market (RECLAIM) in Southern California; eastern nitrogen oxides (NO_X) markets; the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS); and Article 17 of the Kyoto Protocol.

I encourage you to read our article, but, a quick summary of our assessment is that we found modest support for the independence property in the seven cases we examined (but also recognized that it would surely be useful to have more empirical research in this realm).

Politicians Have Had it Right

That the independence property appears to be broadly validated provides support for the efficacy of past political judgments regarding constituency building through legislatures’ allowance allocations in cap-and-trade systems. Governments have repeatedly set the overall emissions cap and then left it up to the political process to allocate the available number of allowances among sources to build support for an initiative without reducing the system’s environmental performance or driving up its cost.

This success with environmental cap-and-trade systems should be contrasted with many other public policy proposals for which the normal course of events is that the political bargaining that is necessary to develop support reduces the effectiveness of the policy or drives up its overall cost. So, the independence property of well-designed and implemented cap-and-trade systems is hardly something to be taken for granted. It is of real political importance and remarkable social value.

Low Prices a Problem? Making Sense of Misleading Talk about Cap-and-Trade in Europe and the USA

Some press accounts and various advocates have labeled the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) as near “the brink of failure” because of the recent trend of very low auction prices. Likewise, commentators have recently characterized the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) as possibly “sinking into oblivion” because of low allowance prices. Since when are low prices (which in this case reflect low marginal abatement costs) considered to be a problem? To understand what’s going on, we need to remind ourselves of the purpose (and promise) of a cap-and-trade regime, and then look at what’s been happening in the respective markets.

The Purpose and Promise of Cap-and-Trade

A cap-and-trade system– if well designed, implemented, and enforced – will limit total emissions of the regulated pollutant to the desired level (the cap), and will do this (if the cap is binding) in a cost-effective manner, by leading regulated sources to each make reductions until they are all experiencing the same marginal abatement cost (the allowance price). Thus, the sources that initially face the highest abatement costs, reduce less, and those sources that face the lowest abatement costs, reduce more, achieving system-wide minimum costs, that is, cost effectiveness. So, the purpose and promise, in a nutshell, is to achieve the targeted level of aggregate pollution control, and – if the cap is binding – do this at the lowest possible cost.

RGGI Allowance Prices

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) – a downstream cap-and-trade system for CO₂ emissions from the power sector in 10 northeast states (Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont, with New Jersey now in the process of withdrawing from the coalition), was launched with relatively unambitious targets, principally in order to keep prices down to prevent severe leakage of electricity demand and hence leakage of CO₂ emissions from the RGGI region to states and provinces outside of the region (mainly from New York to Pennsylvania).

Emissions are capped from 2012 to 2014, and then, starting in 2015, the cap decreases 2.5% per year until it is down by 10% in 2019. This would represent a level of emissions 13% below the 1990 level of emissions. It was originally thought that this would be some 35% below the Business-as-Usual (BAU) level in 2019. Sounds good. What happened is not that the system performed other than designed, but that “business was not as usual.” That is, what happened is that unregulated power-sector (BAU) emissions in the northeast fell significantly. (See the graph below of the RGGI cap and historical emissions.)

For source, please click here.

So, Why Did Emissions Fall in the RGGI States?

This happened for three reasons. First, because of increasing supplies in the United States of low-cost, unconventional sources of natural gas, prices for this fuel have fallen dramatically since 2008. (See the graph below of natural gas and coal prices.) That has meant greater dispatch of electricity from gas-fueled power plants (relative to coal-fired plants), more investment in new gas-fired generating plants, less investment in coal-fired generating capacity, and retirement of existing coal-fired capacity, all of which has contributed to lower CO₂ emissions.

For source, please click here.

Second, the worst economic recession since the Great Depression hit the United States in 2008, causing dramatic reductions in electricity demand in the industrial and commercial sectors, reducing emissions. (See the graph below of quarterly percentage change in U.S. GDP, 2007-2009.)

For source, please click here.

Third and finally, moderate northeast temperatures have kept down CO₂ emissions linked with both heating and cooling.

Low Emissions, Low Allowance Demand, Low Allowance Prices

So, for the three reasons above, BAU CO₂ emissions from the power sector in the RGGI states are dramatically below what was originally (and quite reasonably) anticipated. The supply of RGGI CO₂ allowances made available at auction is – by law – unchanged, but demand for these allowances has fallen dramatically, hence the fall in RGGI allowance prices. (See the graph below of RGGI allowance prices, 2008-2010.)

For source, please click here.

Given that emissions are below the RGGI cap and – due to expectations regarding future natural gas prices – are likely to remain below the cap, there is no scarcity of allowances. Shouldn’t the price fall to zero? In theory, yes, except that the system has an auction reservation price of $1.86 per ton built in, thereby creating a price floor of precisely this amount.

Is RGGI a Failure?

So, the cap put in place by the RGGI system is being achieved, but it is not binding. RGGI may not be particularly relevant, but it is not thereby a flawed system; surely it is not a failure. Rather, a great environmental success has been achieved by the “fortunate coincidence” of low natural gas prices, economic recession, and mild weather. This is hardly something to be lamented.

True enough, the RGGI system does have flaws (such as its narrow scope limited to electricity generation, and its lack of a simple safety valve, as I have written about in the past). But the low allowance prices are evidence of a success outside of the RGGI market, not evidence of failure within the RGGI market.

If the RGGI states have the desire and the political will to tighten the cap in the future, then the system can again become binding, environmentally relevant, and cost-effective. That’s an ongoing political debate.

To be fair, I should note that the same outcome I have described here can be spun – perhaps for political purposes – quite differently. Recently, a self-described “free-market energy blog” commentator claimed – not without some justification – that RGGI is irrelevant or worse: “Bottom line, the program has raised electricity prices, created a slush fund for each of the member states, and has had virtually no impact on emissions or on global climate change.”

Phrased differently, due to exogenous circumstances (I’ve described above), the RGGI program is non-binding, and so has no direct effect on emissions, but its relatively low auction reservation price does lead to very small impacts on electricity prices, and produces revenues for participating states, revenues which those states would surely claim are of value for state-level energy-efficiency and other programs that indirectly do affect CO2 emissions. So, the real bottom line is that low RGGI allowance prices are not a consequence of poor system design or a fatal flaw of cap-and-trade systems in general, but rather a consequence of what are in reality some exogenous coincidences that have turned out to be good news for the environment.

Now, let’s turn to the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS).

EU ETS Allowance Prices

Unlike RGGI, the EU ETS has not been irrelevant. It has successfully capped European CO₂ emissions, achieved significant emissions reductions, and it has done so — more or less — cost-effectively. (More about this hedging on cost-effectiveness below). Not surprisingly, like RGGI, the EU ETS has some design flaws (principally, its limited scope – electricity generation and large-scale manufacturing – and lack of a safety-valve), but as with RGGI, its low allowance prices should not be taken as bad news, but to some degree as good news, and certainly not as a sign of failure of the EU ETS.

Hand-wringing in Europe over Low Allowance Prices

There has been much hand-wringing in Europe over the “failure of the system” because of low allowance prices. Indeed, Danish Energy Minister Martin Lidegaard said earlier this month that low carbon prices threaten the EU ETS.

Of course, he’s correct that EU ETS allowance prices are “low.” They are down from their historic average of about $20 per ton of CO₂ to about $9 per ton currently (having reached an all-time low of $7.88 in early April). Here’s a graph of EU ETS allowance prices (EUAs) over the crucial period of change, January 2007 to January 2009.

For source, please click here.

At this point in this essay, I probably don’t need to say that this pattern is partly explained by the global recession, which has hit Europe particularly hard (and now threatens a double-dip recession in a number of European nations). Lower European – and global – demand has meant decreased economic activity in Europe, hence lower energy demand, lower CO₂ emissions, and therefore lower demand and lower prices for EU ETS allowances.

Even if we assume a growth rate of European CO₂ emissions 1 percent less than the growth rate of GDP (represented by the dotted “counterfactual” BAU line in the graph below, which estimates what emissions would have been from 2005 to 2010 without the introduction of the EU’s Emissions Trading System), the evidence makes clear that the EU ETS has succeeded in reducing emissions significantly below what would be expected from the recession alone.

For source, please click here.

This is where an important caveat needs to be introduced. Also feeding into this allowance price depression has been a set of national and regional energy policies, such as those promoting use of renewables, which have served to reduce emissions, demand for allowances, and hence allowance prices (while rendering the overall CO2 program less cost-effective by ensuring that marginal abatement costs remain heterogeneous). So, to the degree that the low allowance prices are due to so-called complimentary policies, the low prices are bad news about public policy (in cost-effectiveness terms), not good news. But this refers to misguided complimentary policies (which fail to bring about any incremental emissions reductions — under the cap-and-trade umbrella — and drive up aggregate cost), not to any design flaw in the EU ETS itself.

Multiple Goals Typically Require Multiple Policy Instruments

No doubt, Minister Lidegaard is aware of the allowance price impacts of the recession, and I hope he’s aware of the allowance price consequences of these other energy and environmental policies. The problem arises, however, because he sees the fundamental purpose of the EU ETS as somewhat broader than what I described at the beginning of this essay (namely, achieving emissions consistent with some cap, and doing so cost-effectively – if the cap is binding). For him – and many other European observers – “the purpose of the ETS was to cap CO₂ emissions in the E.U. and ensure clear economic incentives for investment in renewables.” So, the hand-wringing is not about a failure to achieve emissions reductions cost-effectively, but to have prices high enough to achieve other goals – in this case, greater use of renewable sources of energy. For others, the “other goals” have involved allowance prices high enough to bring about some targeted amount of technology innovation.

As I have written at this blog in the past, having multiple policy goals typically necessitates multiple policy instruments. For example, if the goal is a combination of reducing emissions cost-effectively and having prices maintained at some minimum (whether to bring about greater use of renewable energy sources or to inspire more technology innovation), then two policy instruments are needed to do the job: a cap-and-trade system for the first goal in combination with a carbon tax in the form of a price floor (as in RGGI) for the second goal.

Don’t Throw Out the Baby with the Bath Water

In other words, the EU ETS has not failed, but the design was inadequate (that is, incomplete) for what politicians now seem to want. If the Europeans want a price floor in their system (or better yet, a price collar, which would combine a price floor with a safety valve, i.e., price ceiling), then this is certainly feasible technically and economically. Likewise, if the EU member states have the desire and the political will to tighten the cap in the future, there are a variety of ways in which they can accomplish this, rendering the program more stringent and increasing allowances prices. But, in any event, the European Commission’s Energy division, Environment division, and Climate division should sort out the real effects of the “complimentary policies” that have contaminated the EU ETS, and which fail to bring about additional emissions reductions but drive up costs. Whether any of this is feasible politically is a question that my European colleagues and friends can best address.

The Promise and Problems of Pricing Carbon

Friday, October 21^st was a significant day for climate change policy worldwide and for the use of market-based approaches to environmental protection, but it went largely unnoticed across the country and around the world, outside, that is, of the State of California. On that day, the California Air Resources Board voted unanimously to adopt formally the nation’s most comprehensive cap-and-trade system, intended to provide financial incentives to firms to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, notably carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, to their 1990 level by the year 2020, as part of the implementation of California’s Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Compliance will begin in 2013, eventually covering 85% of the state’s emissions.

This policy for the world’s eighth-largest economy is more ambitious than the much heralded (and much derided) Federal policy proposal – H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey bill – that was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in June of 2009, and then died in the U.S. Senate the following year. With a likely multi-year hiatus on significant climate policy action in Washington now in place, California’s system – which will probably link with similar cap-and-trade systems being developed in Ontario, Quebec, and possibly British Columbia – will itself become the focal point of what may evolve to be the “North American Climate Initiative.”

The Time is Ripe for Reflection

California’s formal adoption of its CO₂ cap-and-trade system is an important milestone on the multinational path to carbon pricing policies, and signals that the time is ripe to reflect on the promise and problems of pricing carbon, which is the title of a new paper that Joe Aldy and I have written for a special issue of the Journal of Environment and Development edited by Thomas Sterner and Maria Damon on “Experience with Environmental Taxation” (“The Promise and Problems of Pricing Carbon: Theory and Experience,” October 27, 2011). [For anyone who is not familiar with my co-author, let me state for the record that Joseph Aldy is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, having come to Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Washington, D.C., where he served, most recently, during 2009 and 2010, as Special Assistant to the President for Energy and Environment. Before that, he was a Fellow at Resources for the Future, the Washington think tank.]

Why Price Carbon?

In a modern economy, nearly all aspects of economic activity affect greenhouse gas – in particular, CO₂ – emissions. Hence, for a climate change policy to be effective, it must affect decisions regarding these diverse activities. This can be done in one of three ways: mandating that businesses and individuals change their behavior; subsidizing businesses and individuals; or pricing the greenhouse gas externality.

As economists and virtually all other policy analysts now recognize, by internalizing the externalities associated with CO₂ emissions, carbon pricing can promote cost-effective abatement, deliver powerful innovation incentives, and – for that matter – ameliorate rather than exacerbate government fiscal problems. [See the concise and compelling argument made by Yale Professor William Nordhaus in his essay, “Energy: Friend or Enemy?” in The New York Review of Books, October 27, 2011.]

By pricing CO₂ emissions (or, more likely, by pricing the carbon content of the three fossil fuels – coal, petroleum, and natural gas), governments wisely defer to private firms and individuals to find and exploit the lowest cost ways to reduce emissions and invest in the development of new technologies, processes, and ideas that could further mitigate emissions.

Can Market-Based Instruments Really Work?

Market-based instruments have been used with considerable success in other environmental domains, as well as for pricing CO₂ emissions. The U.S. sulfur dioxide (SO₂) cap-and-trade program cut U.S. power plant SO₂ emissions more than 50 percent after 1990, and resulted in compliance costs one half of what they would have been under conventional regulatory mandates.

The success of the SO₂ allowance trading program motivated the design and implementation of the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS), the world’s largest cap-and-trade program, focused on cutting CO₂ emissions from power plants and large manufacturing facilities throughout Europe. The U.S. lead phase-down of gasoline in the 1980s, by reducing the lead content per gallon of fuel, served as an early, effective example of a tradable performance standard. These and other positive experiences provide motivation for considering market-based instruments as potential approaches to mitigating GHG emissions.

What Policy Instruments Can be Used for Carbon Pricing?

In our paper, Joe Aldy and I critically examine the five generic policy instruments that could conceivably be employed by regional, national, or even sub-national governments for carbon pricing: carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, emission reduction credits, clean energy standards, and fossil fuel subsidy reduction. Having written about these approaches many times in previous essays at this blog, today I will simply direct the reader to those previous posts or, better yet, to the paper we’ve written for the Journal of Environment and Development.

Although it is natural to think and talk about carbon pricing using the future tense, a few carbon pricing regimes are already in place.

Regional, National, and Sub-National Experiences with Carbon Pricing

Explicit carbon pricing policy regimes currently in place include the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS); the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the northeast United States; New Zealand’s cap-and-trade system; the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism; a number of northern European carbon tax policies; British Columbia’s carbon tax; and Alberta’s tradable carbon performance standard (similar to a clean energy standard). We describe and assess all of these in our paper.

Also, the Japanese Voluntary Emissions Trading System has operated since 2006 (Japan is considering a compulsory emissions trading system), and Norway operated its own emissions trading system for several years before joining the EU ETS in 2008. Legislation to establish cap-and-trade systems is under debate in Australia (combined with a carbon tax for an initial three-year period) and in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. And, of course, California is now committed to launching its own GHG cap-and-trade system.

International Coordination Will Be Needed

Of course, climate change is truly a global commons problem: the location of greenhouse gas emissions has no effect on the global distribution of damages. Hence, free-riding problems plague unilateral and multilateral approaches, because mitigation costs are likely to exceed direct benefits for virtually all countries. Cost-effective international policies – insuring that countries get the most environmental benefit out of their mitigation investments – will help promote participation in an international climate policy regime.

In principle, internationally-employed market-based instruments can achieve overall cost effectiveness. Three basic routes stand out. First, countries could agree to apply the same tax on carbon (harmonized domestic taxes) or adopt a uniform international tax. Second, the international policy community could establish a system of international tradable permits, – effectively a nation-state level cap-and-trade program. In its simplest form, this represents the Kyoto Protocol’s Annex B emission targets and the Article 17 trading mechanism. Third and most likely, a more decentralized system of internationally-linked domestic cap-and-trade programs could ensure internationally cost-effective emission mitigation. We examine the merits and the problems associated with each of these means of international coordination in the paper.

What Lies in the Future?

In reality, political responses in most countries to proposals for market-based approaches to climate policy have been and will continue to be largely a function of issues and factors that transcend the scope of environmental and climate policy. Because a truly meaningful climate policy – whether market-based or conventional in design – will have significant impacts on economic activity in a wide variety of sectors and in every region of a country, proposals for these policies inevitably bring forth significant opposition, particularly during difficult economic times.

In the United States, political polarization – which began some four decades ago, and accelerated during the economic downturn – has decimated what had long been the key political constituency in the Congress for environmental action, namely, the middle, including both moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats. Whereas Congressional debates about environmental and energy policy had long featured regional politics, they are now fully and simply partisan. In this political maelstrom, the failure of cap-and-trade climate policy in the U.S. Senate in 2010 was essentially collateral damage in a much larger political war.

It is possible that better economic times will reduce the pace – if not the direction – of political polarization. It is also possible that the ongoing challenge of large budgetary deficits in many countries will increase the political feasibility of new sources of revenue. When and if this happens, consumption taxes (as opposed to traditional taxes on income and investment) could receive heightened attention, and primary among these might be energy taxes, which can be significant climate policy instruments, depending upon their design.

That said, it is probably too soon to predict what the future will hold for the use of market-based policy instruments for climate change. Perhaps the two decades we have experienced of relatively high receptivity in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world to cap-and-trade and offset mechanisms will turn out to be no more than a relatively brief departure from a long-term trend of reliance on conventional means of regulation. It is also possible, however, that the recent tarnishing of cap-and-trade in U.S. political dialogue will itself turn out to be a temporary departure from a long-term trend of increasing reliance on market-based environmental policy instruments. It is much too soon to say.