About the book: The European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is the world's largest market for carbon and the most significant multinational initiative ever taken to mobilize markets to protect the environment. It will be an important influence on the development and implementation of trading schemes in the US, Japan, and elsewhere. However, as is true of any pioneering public policy experiment, this scheme has generated much controversy. Pricing Carbon provides the first detailed description and analysis of the EU ETS, focusing on the first 'trial' period of the scheme (2005-7). Written by an international team of experts, it allows readers to get behind the headlines and come to a better understanding of what was done and what happened based on a dispassionate, empirically based review of the evidence. This book should be read by anyone who wants to know what happens when emissions are capped, traded, and priced.

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Op-Ed: E.U. Greenhouse Gas Plan: Better Than It Sounds by A. Denny Ellerman (Forbes.com, March 18, 2010)

We provide a set of three emissions scenarios with known probability characteristics generated using an uncertainty technique known as the deterministic equivalent modeling method (DEMM), which requires distributions for uncertain parameter inputs and then uses a statistical sampling technique to generate parameter sets, and the MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model. Emissions of CO2, CH4, N2O, SF6, PFC, HFC, NOx, SOx, CO, NMVOC, NH3 and carbonaceous particulates from 1995 through 2100 at 5 year intervals are provided on a 1° by 1° latitude-longitude grid. These scenarios do not include emissions from natural sources or sinks of carbon, other GHGs, or other substances. They include emissions of carbon and other substances from land use change (deforestation) and agriculture (waste burning, livestock, rice production, soils) but do not include carbon sinks due to forest regrowth. The scenarios were selected by chosing parameter sets that produced the median (50 percentile value) and 97.5 percentile value (upper) and 2.5 percentile value (lower) limit for CO2 emissions in 2100 (i.e. a range covering 95 percent of the distribution). Conditional on these values, we then chose parameter sets that produced 50 percentile values for each of the other emissions. This scenario selection design was chosen so that the resulting scenarios are approximately 2.5, 50, 97.5 percentile outcomes yet retain the characteristic that the scenarios for all substances are the result of internally consistent scenarios given the structure of the EPPA model.

The gulf separating Europe and the US on the issue of climate change has remained persistent and deep. The US delegation disregards the need for public and congressional support for their negotiating position.

© 1999 Heldref Publications

Natural gas will be more important than the Kyoto Protocol to coal's future. How, and whether, this ambitious international agreement is implemented will significantly affect coal's prospects. But the more important feature of coal's future is likely to be the possibility for displacement by other fuels, specifically natural gas, whose recent expansion is due far more to its newly found abundance than to its touted environmental attributes. Natural gas enjoys an ease of handling and environmental attributes that give it clear advantages in relatively small-scale uses typical of households, commercial establishments and general industry. Coal's only advantage is price. Low cost is not an insignificant advantage, but it is a relative one that depends as much on the competing fuel as it does on coal. Therein lies a threat, no less serious but more real than the prospects for meaningful implementation of the Kyoto Protocol.