The European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS)

Abstract

The earth’s atmosphere is in danger to be overly exploited as a global common due to the lack of institutionalized rules for sustainable use, as Garrett Hardin elucidated in his seminal work on The Tragedy of Commons (1968): “The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of ‘fouling our own nest’, so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.” The alarming rise in global temperatures, caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, will bring dangerous global climate change with potentially devastating consequences for humankind and ecosystem if humankind fails to change now and radically reduce her pollution (IPCC, 2013).