Brussels, 18/06/2013 (Agence Europe) - For short-term reform of the European Emissions Trading System (ETS), a parliamentary compromise is possible on Wednesday 19 June on the recasting of the European Commission proposal aimed at placing a temporary freeze (“backloading”) on 900 million surplus quotas, during the vote by the Parliament's environment committee (ENVI) chaired by Mathias Groote (S&D, Germany). This would be possible due to consolidated compromise amendments acceptable for the EPP, the S&D and the Liberals, two MEPs from the EPP Group told the press on Tuesday 18 June. Corien Wortmann-Kool of the Netherlands, who is vice-president of the group responsible for the economy and the environment, and Richard Seeber of Austria, who is spokesman for the group within the environment committee, seemed confident that, after the vote on 16 April when the plenary session sent the text back to the drawing board, the compromise, if voted, may facilitate approval of the text by the plenary during the first week of July (7 or 8 July).
Backloading is very important for the EPP Group but structural reform of the ETS is needed, which is something that backloading does not provide, said Wortmann-Kool. Many amendments will serve this aim. “We want to keep high carbon-intensive industries in Europe and ensure that they are competitive globally. This compromise is the basis for the plenary session vote” (our translation throughout), she said. Nonetheless, the EPP Group (of 269 members) reserves the right to analyse the environment committee's vote in order to define, next week, its final position with a view to the plenary session. “The European Commission is not a market regulator. The ETS must remain a market instrument, and we want guarantees that the freeze will not be permanent. I believe that the compromise will happen within the environment committee and within the EPP”, Seeber said.
The compromise provides for: - intervention solely by the European Commission on the carbon market in order to remedy the imbalance between supply and demand responsible for the fall to €3 of the price of carbon per tonne - no permanent freeze of quotas but withdrawal from the market of surplus quotas and their linear and foreseeable reintroduction beginning one year after the last allocation, with the reintroduction of the same quantity of quotas each year between 2016 and 2020; - out of the 900 million quotas temporarily withdrawn from the market at the start of the third ETS trading period (2013-2015), the allocation of receipts of 600 million quotas to a fund for financing investment in R&D in eco-innovation and renewable energies; - the extension from 2015 to 2020 of the list of high-intensity carbon companies exposed to significant carbon leakage; - a request to the Commission for a proposal of long term reform of ETS (in addition to its communication on the subject); - and an assessment impact study to look at the effect that backloading would have on energy prices for citizens and businesses. (AN/transl.jl)