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Why I am voting in favour of the ETS deal in the European Parliament
(EurActiv, 22 Jun 2022) Today’s European Parliament vote on the revised EU Emissions Trading System is meant to defend a minimum standard on climate action, argues MEP Michael Bloss. “This is, unfortunately, all we can get with the current majorities in the European Parliament,” he writes.
Michael Bloss is a German Member of the European Parliament affiliated with the Greens/EFA group. He is the shadow rapporteur for the Greens on the revised ETS directive.
A democracy that does not argue is not a democracy at all, former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt once said. And we in the EU Parliament have argued a lot. At the beginning of June, about the emission trading system, the percentages in climate ambitions, or the final phase-out date for free CO2 certificates. What is complicatedly called rebasing, LRF or one-off reduction became a real climate protection thriller.
This thriller was caused by a fossil alliance of conservatives, right-wingers and liberals in the EU Parliament. After the historic decision of the Parliament’s Environment Committee on the new emission trading system, they had joined forces to significantly lower the ambitions for climate action in the plenary vote.
A year earlier, the EU Commission had proposed its idea of 61% fewer emissions within the trading system. The Environment Committee wanted 67%, and the fossil alliance wanted none of that. It wanted even less and ripped loopholes into Europe’s biggest lever in climate action to make it weak.
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EurActiv, 22 Jun 2022: Why I am voting in favour of the ETS deal in the European Parliament
