Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether carbon trading remains a valid approach to controlling carbon dioxide pollution.

As the Clean Growth Strategy clearly sets out, we remain firmly committed to carbon pricing as an emissions reduction tool whilst ensuring energy and trade intensive businesses are appropriately protected from any detrimental impacts on competitiveness.

Carbon pricing is an effective tool to reduce emissions through the market. Cap-and-trade guarantees that emissions targets are met and emissions reductions take place where it is most cost-effective to do so.

The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) has been instrumental in driving the adoption of emissions trading systems worldwide. While the EU ETS remains the world’s first and largest cap-and-trade system, similar systems exist or are in development across the world including in California, Quebec, New Zealand, South Korea and China. The EU ETS is on course to achieve emissions reductions of 21% by 2020 against 2005 levels in the traded sector in line with agreed EU targets.