Norway and Emissions Trading: From Global Front-Runner to EU Follower

A striking convergence has taken place in the design of the Norwegian and EU greenhouse gas emissions trading systems from 1998 to 2004. This article argues that the Norwegian adaptation to the EU did not take place as a consequence of perceived legal obligations under the European Economic Area agreement. Nor did it take place due to Norwegian actors being persuaded about the merits of the EU design. The main explanation has to do with interests. The EU market and politics are of course generally very important for Norway. However, before the US pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, the Norwegian outlook in climate politics was global. The US pull-out accelerated the development and hence the attractiveness of the EU trading system and resulted in EU emissions trading as the most probable and possibly only international market for Norway to link up to. Hence, this analysis provides further support to the importance of being sensitive to the global context and institutional interaction when analyzing the relationship between the EU and its neighboring countries.     

追溯与寻明:国际法视角下的碳排放权单位研究

自以《京都议定书》为基础的市场化机制建立以来,经过近20年的发展,全球碳金融市场呈现蓬勃发展的态势,交易量大幅提升,成交金额不断攀升,市场化机制在夯实中不断完善和发展。同时,争端与纠纷日益增加,国际多边环境公约调整下的碳排放权机制部分地在WTO体制下进行规制,成为众多学者的憧憬。碳排放权单位体现的既不是GATT框架下的"产品",也不是GATS框架下的"服务",而是在经济上反映出特殊的金融衍生产品的属性。然而,碳排放权单位交易商提供服务的行为契合GATS金融服务要求,因此交易商可依据GATS享受跨国服务领域中的最惠国待遇,并可将与WTO规则相关的争端诉诸WTO争端解决机制,实现环境争端解决的规范化、法制化。     

Market Darwinism vs. Market Creationism: Adaptability and Fairness in the Design of Greenhouse Gas Trading Mechanisms

International rule-making and compliance routines with respect to the Kyoto Protocol are evolving rapidly. This paper examines potential designs of emissions-trading programs by comparing the emissions credit trading (ECT) and cap-and-trade models for achieving cost-effective reductions in atmospheric greenhouse-gas (GHG) loading in terms of their adaptability and fairness. Adaptability is a valuable attribute when markets and their governing institutions are evolving rapidly or when regulated entities do not yet have well-established and predictable compliance routines. Fairness in both procedures and outcomes is central to efforts to establish and maintain institutions of international governance. The key difference concerns the awarding of tradable emission rights, which occurs at the launch of a cap-and-trade program but following when firms reduce emissions below baselines in an ECT scheme. Implications of this difference are explored in terms of institutional adaptability and fairness during program-design stages. By not locking in emission rights at the outset, and by being amenable to incremental roll-out, ECT appears to have superior adaptive and fairness qualities during periods of rapid institutional evolution.     

Increasing Participation and Compliance in International Climate Change Agreements

Scientific and economic consensus points to the need for a credible and cost-effective approach to address the threat of global climate change, but the Kyoto Protocol to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change appears incapable of inducing significant participation and compliance. We assess the Protocol and alternative policy architectures, with particular attention to their respective abilities to induce participation and compliance. We find that those approaches that offer cost-effective mitigation are unlikely to induce significant participation and compliance, while those approaches that are likely to enjoy a reasonably high level of implementation by sovereign states are sorely lacking in terms of their anticipated cost effectiveness. The feasible set of policy architectures is thus limited to second-best alternatives.     

合作与牵制:气候变化的国际法律机制及其应对

全球气候变化问题是当前的热点话题,各国在参与实施《联合国气候变化框架公约》及《东京议定书》中都在积极寻求制高点。因此在全球气候变化的控制和实施方面,国际社会体现出合作与牵制两种表现,牵制是在谈判中的牵制,谈判是相互牵制的谈判,这两种表现中,合作是目的,牵制是手段。发展中国家要在2012年之前做好充分准备具有一定的挑战性,需要处理好合作与牵制的关系,我国面临的问题具有一定的独特性,处理好控制全球气候变化方面的合作与牵制的关系,积极应对全球气候变化问题。     

Climate Change Policies, Energy Security and Carbon Dependency Trade-offs for the European Union in the Longer Term

Energy policy in the European Union (EU) faces two major challenges. The first challenge is posed by EUs commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere in the context of the international agreement on climate change. The second challenge is to keep ensuring European security of energy supply, while its dependency on external sources of energy is projected to increase. In this paper, two long-term alternative climate change policy scenarios for Europe are examined. In the first scenario, EU reduces carbon dioxide emissions by domestic measures; in the second scenario EU maximizes cooperation with the countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU). Impacts on carbon flows between the EU and FSU and on the external energy dependency of the EU are assessed with an applied general equilibrium model, GTAP-E, whose set of energy commodities is expanded with combustible biomass as a renewable and carbon-neutral energy commodity. The results show that there is a trade-off between economic efficiency, energy security and carbon dependency for the EU. The FSU would unambiguously prefer cooperation.     

The Climate Change Regime: An Enviro-Economic Problem and International Administrative Law in the Making

The climate change problem, or global warming, has gained a prominent place on the international political agenda, since the mid-1980s, when it first attracted political attention. The problem was initially perceived mainly as an environmental problem that could be resolved by technological solutions, its current perception, this essay argues, is best characterized as that of an enviro-economic problem. A perception that is exemplified by the ongoing negotiations for the development of economic mechanisms to tackle the problem. The climate change arena is a complex one, involving dichotomies between developed and developing countries, between fossil fuel producing and importing countries and between small island developing states and other states. This essay outlines the interests that play a role in the climate change negotiations and discusses the international climate change regime as contained in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol. It concludes that the climate change negotiations are complicated by the fact that the negotiators, in addition to developing new substantive rules for a complex problem, are involved in developing new systemic rules for the international legal system. These new systemic rules have more in common with rules of national systems of public or administrative law than with traditional rules of international law, which have many similarities with national systems of contract law.     

Overlapping International Regimes: The Case of the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF) between Climate Change and Biodiversity

A great number of organisations and actors are participating in a plethora of international and regional fora geared towards the forest issue. Are there inherent traits about how these fora interact that can increase understanding about why the forest issue seems largely to be at a standstill? In this article I focus on the final meeting of the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF-4) and examine the overlap with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the overlap with the Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC). How have the overlaps between these international fora been dealt with and why has one led to linkages while the other has not?

     

Biotic Carbon Sequestration and the Kyoto Protocol: The Construction of Global Knowledge by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

This paper explores the dynamics of the production of global knowledge by an international knowledge organization, in this case the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Based on previous notions of international boundary organizations, the idea of international knowledge organizations emphasizes the knowledge generation function of such organizations rather than their convening function. Using the case of controversial Kyoto Protocol biotic carbon sequestration policies, I argue that boundary work and uncertainty management are the essential dynamics in the successful construction of global knowledge by international knowledge organizations. This uncertainty management occurs in a manner broadly, although not completely, in conformance with the institutional preferences of powerful policy actors. Global knowledge can legitimate and help refine global policies, but the process of its construction must be iterative and transparent if it is to be credible for global environmental governance over the long-term.