Strategy matters, does the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme?
Year: 2011
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: For most nations, increased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are the only way to reach economic development. At the same time awareness about future costs for handling climate change related problems show how the market has failed to reflect this cost on produced and consumed goods. To counter this externality problem the European Union introduced in year 2005 a system for trading allowances to emit CO2, the EU ETS (European Union Emissions Trading Scheme). More than 10’000 installations from energy, metal, mineral, pulp, paper and board industries are included thus covering about half of EUs CO2 emissions.The EU ETS has been criticized for being ineffective and not leading to enough emission reductions. At the same time the climate change issue is assumed to be on many corporate agendas, but do we know if that is the case? In year 2006 we saw the much famous Stern Review, in year 2007 Al Gore and IPCC were appointed laureates for the Nobel price, but did EU ETS play a part in putting the climate change issue under the eyes of corporate leaders?This study presents a content analysis of more than 1100 shareholder letters from 131 of the largest European corporations during year 2000 to 2009. The main target is to analyze to what extent (if or if not) climate change is on the corporate agenda. Does CEOs and corporate chairmen discus climate related topics?The result show that for the trading sector (but not other sectors) the climate change issue appeared in year 2005. This is comparable to other sectors such as finance and insurance, were the issue appeared one year later in 2006. However the result also show that the recent financial crises as such, swept away the climate change issue for industry heavily - but not as much in the trading sector as in other sectors. In total this mean: money matters if we expect industry to care about climate change. Concerning climate change action; political interfering in CEOs daily life is effective when a cost component is involved.
Authors: Fabian Levihn, Henrik Blomgren
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W126156905