EU pollution plan turns into 'playground' - by Mathew Carr and Saijel Kishan
When European Union officials created a market for trading pollution credits, they boasted that it was a "cost-conscious way" to save the planet from global warming. Five years later, the 25-country EU is failing to meet the Kyoto Protocol's carbon dioxide emission standards. Rather than help protect the environment, the trading system has led to increases in electricity prices of more than 50 percent and record profits for RWE and other utilities.
"I don't suppose the environment has noticed the European emissions trading scheme," said William Blyth, director of Oxford Energy Associates in Oxford, England, and a former International Energy Agency official who advises businesses on energy and climate change policy. The utilities and emissions traders, in contrast, "have done very well."
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