The EU’s flagship environmental policy is a disaster on a titanic scale. Not only is it adding to energy bills, aggravating fuel poverty and leading to international trade wars, it has also had no real environmental benefit and is unlikely to provide any until 2016, over ten years since its inception. Indeed, the only beneficiaries of the EU’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), the jewel in the crown of European climate change legislation, are big banks and businesses making windfall profits.
The ETS has also been a paradise for criminals. Security in the entirely electronic system is so weak that phishing scams, the simple stealing of passwords to access accounts, shut down the ETS for two weeks. The European Law Agency has even estimated that 90% of all ETS market activity in 2009 was fraudulent. In cost terms, €5 billion has been lost so far from just one kind of VAT fraud. To counter crime, a common auction platform is being developed. However, given that countries are able to opt out of this (and the UK already has), the lax security is only likely to continue.
The Commentator - Environmentalists are undermining their cause by defending emissions trading