The second it is the heterogeneity of the efforts that will be requested

To avoid as much as possible emissions of CO2 occurs today in France in all environments. Specialists in each sector are set to work to examine the opportunities presented in their field, consider targets and suggest the means best suited to achieve in view of the specific aspects of their industry. Hence, sector by sector, an avalanche of standards, specifications, penalties and bonuses all more justified than others.

This approach diversified, which certainly has the merit of mobilising goodwill, has two major defects. The first is that designed by specialists to closest to the ground, with quantitative targets field by field, the device require of new armed officials to monitor, control, adapt, cracking down. The second, it is the heterogeneity of the efforts that will be requested. We will impose emission reductions that will cost, saved per tonne, ten times more than in another area, where it would be inexpensive to do much better here. For such activity, very issuing by nature, should be avoided too extensive demands that would heavily affect its cost, while it will not hesitate to penalise such another little transmitter whose competitiveness activity will be barely affected - as if the purpose of the operation was to obtain a certain amount of tax, and not a certain volume of CO2 emissions reduction!

It becomes an urgent need to put order in the maquis. The only effective and rational solution for a generalized control of emissions of carbon dioxide, that is to tax CO2 emissions at a single rate regardless of the sector, and outline if possible, an evolution of that rate for the next few years. either supply an annual market of emission that put volume to the in dear will correspond to the objective set for the year, with a sketch of the likely evolution of this volume. The two branches of the alternative have the merit of maximum emissions equal expense. They are equivalent if the volume of rights placed on the market, each year, is well as the course of balance which will establish finally proved equal to the level of the tax that it would set for that year.

Two questions arise. First point point can be simply operate via taxes or emission rights Should therefore tackle as soon as possible demolish the arsenal of bans, standards, grants, penalties, exceptions and other ladies and the Jacobin leaders tolerances, which implies, by way of consequence, remove all unnecessary became jobs that go with As a first approximation, Yes. But the decision will be difficult to obtain because, among the specificities of our compatriots, there is the - unfortunate - do not believe price game. I will quote only the example of the price of gasoline, which we said in Paris that it has no lasting effect on the behaviour of drivers. Yet it is clear that if the car were three times larger and heavier in the United States in France, it is because - because there have integrated the cost of the road network, included in France via the internal oil tax - the price of gasoline was there three times lower.

That said, there are probably cases in which public power is to correct the behaviour of citizens, for example when most involved citizens said are not our contemporaries, but those of future generations. It is that for decisions at long range, such as the insulation of the building of housing for example, some standards support today, for our descendants, the behaviour of the future year cêtres that we are.

However, letting go to regulate, on the pretext that our fellow citizens are too stupid to understand their interests, too lazy to engage when they understood it, or too rich to be sensitive to the introduction of a tax (or of a market of rights), is embarking on a system in which the outcome is hardly exciting - see the Soviet Union, the North Korea or Cuba.

If the assumption that one can avoid the high way and therefore trust the game corrected prices, should second point, be build on taxes or the marketing of emission rights Provided do not express make complicate the perception, taxation has the great merit of simplicity. We tax carbon source, the output of refineries for oil (or the arrival of refined products entering by sea), at the exit of the international gas pipelines or station of arrival of the liquefied gas for gas, the arrival of coal in the ports. It is the simplest, even after zero-rates the rare non-fuel uses of these carbon energies.

However, the disadvantage of (smart) taxation is that the reduction of the application to expect cannot be accurately predicted.

The use of emission rights avoids this pitfall but has symmetric failure: years (bad) economic conditions and the climate conditions (hot) abnormally reduced energy consumption, the amount of the duties placed on the market at the beginning of the year will prove to be excessive and the course of these rights will collapse, except to predict interannual reports systems and organized speculation to absorb the changes in the long-term. In any case, there also, it is important that rights market works the most possible upstream in demi-gros and making retail sales then accompany each delivery of emission rights purchased upstream.

The day where the discussion will be more than the choice between taxation and emission, the exclusion of any other intervention, and on the stage, the more upstream as possible, where the mechanism will work, the treatment of this problem will greatly progressed. It in is not yet.