Over the last decade, cap-and-trade emissions schemes have emerged as one of the favoured policy instruments for reducing GHG emissions. An inherent design feature of cap-and-trade schemes is that, once the cap on emissions has been set, no additional reductions beyond this level can be provided...

Australia is establishing an economy-wide emissions trading scheme, with a detailed proposal tabled by government in December 2008 and a scheme start planned for 2011. The proposal is for unilateral linking through the Clean Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation, but no initial...

We quantified the volume of free allowances that different national allocation plans proposed to allocate to existing and new installations, with specific reference to the power sector. Most countries continue to allocate based on historic emissions, contrary to hopes for improved allocation...

Based on 18 national allocation plans (NAPs) submitted to the European Commission for phase II (2008-2012) of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), we find that, on average, the ET budgets in phase II are only about 2.6% below historical emissions in 2005, about 3.1% lower than the budgets...