Category: Europe

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Carbon Pricing Europe

September 25, 1991-  European Commission proposes a carbon tax…

On this day, 25th September 1991 a carbon tax in Europe was proposed

“The other factor concerned the difficulties the [European] Commission has had in putting into practice the fourth arm of the strategy, the carbon/energy tax. The details of this tax were announced on 25 September 1991. It would be levied on the basis of 50 per cent on the carbon content of energy, and 50 per cent simply on the energy ,and would be set at US $3 per barrel of oil equivalent, rising to US $10 per barrel by 2000. However, by the time the details were announced, it had already become hampered, not least by highly intensive lobbying by European industry (according to the Economist, [19 May 1992: 91] the heaviest lobbying of the EC it has ever engaged in.”

Paterson 1996, p.88

On this day the PPM was

Now it is 420ish – but see here for the latest.

Why this matters. 

The basic things that needed to happen (or some of them) have been known for a very long time.  We couldn’t even get the basics right (thanks in large part to fierce and successful resistance by fossil-ised interests)

What happened next?

The tax got squashed by the diligent and determined efforts of vested interests

Categories
Carbon Capture and Storage Energy Europe Industry Associations Technophilia

Jan 19 (2015) -Four utilities pull out of an EU CCS programme…

On this day, Jan 19, in 2015 “four of Europe’s biggest power utilities, represented in Brussels by Eurelectric, have decided to leave the European Commission’s CCS Technology Platform ZEP.“

The four were Germany’s RWE AG, France’s Electricite de France, Sweden’s Vattenfall AB and Spain’s Gas Natural Fenosa.

The ZEP had been set up in the mid-2000s as “a coalition of companies, scientists and environmental groups seeking ways to capture and bury heat-trapping carbon emissions mainly from the exhausts of coal, oil and gas-fired power plants.”

[On the EU’s “Zero Emissions Power Plant Programme”. See also 2011 article in Nature about Europe and CCS.]

Why? Well, money at stake. As a Bellona press release titled “Utilities feign interest in CCS to get public bail out” said

“Of the move, Bellona Europa Director Jonas Helseth said: – In their poorly concealed attempts to attain capacity payments, Europe’s utilities have misused the trust of the European Commission and Europe’s CCS community. It’s shameless how Eurelectric proudly announces the formation of a new CCS taskforce and ‘calls on policymakers to push ahead’, while simultaneously pulling out of Europe’s largest and widest coalition working on CCS.”

What happened next

Is there any CCS? 

Why this matters.

We keep assuming we can deploy these technologies at massive scale, rapidly, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s one of the ways we avoid looking at how much some of us are emitting.  There is trouble ahead.