London, 18 September (Argus) — The European Parliament's environment committee today rejected a proposal to call on the European Commission to bring forward specific proposals to reform the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS).
The committee rejected the proposal with 32 votes against and 27 in favour. The proposal would have urged the commission to deliver legislation on structural reforms to the EU ETS “at the earliest appropriate date”, including a modification of the existing annual emissions cap reduction factor of 1.74pc to enable the EU to meet its 2050 roadmap CO2 reduction objective. It also pointed to other EU ETS modifications, including limiting access to international offsets and publishing an assessment of a reserve price for allowance auctions.
“It's a bad signal,” Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats member of European Parliament (MEP) and environment committee chair Matthias Groote said. “The [party] groups negotiated a text and in the end the EPP voted against. We need clear signals for low carbon technologies that we want to maintain in the market and now there's nothing.”
Many European People's Party (EPP) MEPs opposed an amendment to the proposal of increasing the EU-wide emissions reduction target of 25pc on 1990 levels by 2020. But the amendment, proposed by EPP MEP Peter Liese, was supported by a majority of the environment committee. EPP MEPs ultimately cited this amendment for their rejection of the overall report, EPP MEP Eija-Riitta Korhola said. Liese has often supported more ambitious measures to strengthen EU climate policy at the EU ETS compared with the majority of his party.
Meanwhile, many MEPs in the European United Left-Nordic Green Left confederation rejected the proposal in the final vote because they opposed another amendment that was adopted — for the scope of the EU ETS to be broadened to include other sectors. This resulted in the far right and far left camps both voting against the overall resolution, which contributed to its defeat. The absence of some members of the S&D and Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) also reduced the ultimate vote count in favour of the report. “It was a failure on behalf of other parties, and ALDE, to get their numbers in,” ALDE MEP Chris Davies said. “We were two members down, the S&D were four members down.” Only 59 out of the environment committee's 69 members voted, although Groote noted that such absences are common because of overlapping commitments in committees by MEPs.
It is now very unlikely the report will be reintroduced to either the environment committee or parliament's plenary. “The committee has killed its own report,” Davies said. Although it is possible for the presidents of each parliamentary party to draft a new proposal and bring it to plenary, this is also very unlikely, Groote added.
The commission will offer a “formal policy line” on structural measures by the end of the year, despite the failure of the report in parliament's environment committee, and proposed reforms will return to parliament.
But MEPs' rejection of the report “sends a message to the commission that the level of ambition is very low indeed,” Davies said. “They would expect difficulty not only in [the EU Council] but also in the parliament.” A stakeholder consultation recently showed that member states in council are split starkly on how to fix the EU ETS.
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