EU emissions trading system: it's really rather good

Greenbang has something rarer than hen’s teeth, rocking horse poo and the Dalai Lama having a hissy fit because someone gave him sweet rather than salted popcorn when he went to see a Steven Seagal movie marathon combined.

It’s a nice story about the European Union, and it’s brought to you via a Pew Center on Global Climate Change-commissioned report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The report says the EU’s emissions trading system is, all in all, working rather well and it can provide a rich seam of information for future cap and trade systems.

Or to quote A. Denny Ellerman, MIT professor and co-author of the report:

“This important public policy experiment is not perfect, but it is far more than any other nation or set of nations has done to control greenhouse-gas emissions–and it works surprisingly well.”

Here’s a snippet from the report:

The EU ETS is also interesting because it provides some insights into the problems to be faced in constructing a global GHG emission trading system. This will be the next stage in global climate diplomacy if and when the U.S. adopts a cap-and-trade system. In imagining a multinational system, it seems clear that participating nations will retain significant discretion in deciding tradable national emission caps albeit with some negotiation; separate national registries will be maintained with some arrangement for international transfers; monitoring, reporting and verification procedures will be administered nationally although necessarily subject to some common standard; and it seems doubtful that internal allocations will be “harmonized.” As the world moves to develop and to link GHG trading systems, challenges similar to those characterizing the EU ETS will have to be confronted.

You can download the report (in all its big-ass PDF glory) right here.