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Are carbon prices redundant in the 2030 EU climate and energy policy package?

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In 2018, an agreement between the key EU institutions – the Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council – was reached after a long-lasting discourse over the 2030 EU climate and energy policy package. This paper offers a comprehensive assessment of the EU package, with its three main targets: lower greenhouse gas emissions, higher renewable share in final energy consumption, and improved energy efficiency. We find that the renewable and energy efficiency targets have been set so high that the derived emissions reduction (50 percent) exceeds the EU climate target (40 percent). Hence, there is no need for an EU climate policy, for example, to use carbon prices to reach the EU climate goals. It is, however, not cost-efficient to achieve the climate target by imposing the three EU targets. We demonstrate that a cost-efficient policy that obtains a 50 percent GHG emissions reduction would increase annual welfare (relative to the Reference scenario) by an amount corresponding to 0.6 percent of GDP in Europe.

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  • Finn Roar Aune & Rolf Golombek, 2020. "Are carbon prices redundant in the 2030 EU climate and energy policy package?," Discussion Papers 940, Statistics Norway, Research Department.
    • Handle: RePEc:ssb:dispap:940
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    Cited by:

    1. Fæhn, Taran & Yonezawa, Hidemichi, 2021. "Emission targets and coalition options for a small, ambitious country: An analysis of welfare costs and distributional impacts for Norway," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    2. Rolf Golombek & Mads Greaker & Snorre Kverndokk & Lin Ma, 2021. "The Transition to Carbon Capture and Storage Technologies," CESifo Working Paper Series 9047, CESifo.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    climate policy; renewables; energy efficiency; energy modeling; EU 2030;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q28 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Renewable Resources and Conservation - - - Government Policy
    • Q41 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Demand and Supply; Prices
    • Q48 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Government Policy
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming

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