test
Search publications, data, projects and authors

Free full text available

Preprint

French

ID: <

10670/1.bnlpt5

>

Where these data come from
The European Union’s environmental strategy

Abstract

The environmental economy intersects the most complex economic and political economy issues in theory and most retorts in practice: intergenerational justice, the production and preservation of public goods, the management of externalities at national and international level, the temporal coherence of public policies and global and regional collective action. Assuming a trade-off between economic growth and the preservation of natural resources is a naive way of raising the problem, when it is known that the tools have essentially been invented by humans to transform nature. The real trade-offs concern the different ways of sustainable development and the practical means of implementing them. Environmental policy is indeed an implementing art: everything is a matter of means and methods, since the aims are essentially the subject of consensus. Thus, in March 2007, under the vigorous impetus of the German Presidency, the European Member States managed to agree without too much difficulty on the objective of unilaterally reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by 20 % by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. But the problem remains complete: how? How can we ensure that the vision of a sustainable Europe does not become “a Lisbon agenda” a, a huge ambition with minimal means? The economic analysis goes in the middle of the environmental problem as defined: it can hardly comment at an early stage on the validity of the scientific consensus on climate change, let alone, downstream, on the respective technological qualities of the methods for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, it can offer expertise on both the relevance of the models used to calculate the medium- and long-term impacts of climate change on lifestyles and address the potential effectiveness of the envisaged incentive schemes to achieve specific environmental objectives. The contribution of this article relates to the latter point. We try to answer the following question: does the EU have the best institutional system to carry out its environmental strategy? Having shown why this is not the case, we propose to improve it by establishing a European Environment, Energy and Research Community, the objectives and instruments of which we detail.

Your Feedback

Please give us your feedback and help us make GoTriple better.
Fill in our satisfaction questionnaire and tell us what you like about GoTriple!