To help accelerate the shift from coal to gas and renewables, France’s Ecology Minister Brune Poirson has called for a price floor of from €25 to €30 per tonne in power generation.
Power generation accounts for about a fifth of the bloc’s total emissions.
“The prices are often too weak to push real changes in behaviour and yet this is what we need if we are going to accelerate the fight against climate change,” Poirson told a conference hosted by France in Brussels on March 5 to debate the issue.
As reported by the Reuters news agency, the conference in Brussels brought together officials from France, Germany, Britain, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden to discuss how to send a strong market signal toward meeting the bloc’s goals of reducing greenhouse gases by at least 40% by 2030.
Carbon prices under the European Emissions Trading System (ETS), which charges more than 11,000 companies for each tonne of carbon dioxide they emit, have suffered from a glut of permits, prompting reforms agreed this year.
