気候変動の政治経済学

EUと日本における排出量取引の導入と経済利益構造

抄録

There has been a growing attention to emissions trading to reduce carbon emissions domestically because emissions trading is seen as an efficient policy measure, which offers business sectors cost-effective options to tackle carbon reduction.
Now we can find a trend toward emission trading at several levels from regional to national and sub-national levels.
However, each emissions trading has different levels of regulation.
Focusing on two cases: the EU and Japan, this article explores what makes differences to the different level of regulation in each emissions trading system.
The EU Emission Trading System (EU ETS) is more mandatory because of the additional costs it could cause to business sectors.
The Directorate-General (DG) Environment of the European Commission took the initiative to adopt a “cap and trade” system at EU level based on absolute limits on carbon emissions from each installation.
This case symbolizes the EU's leadership in climate policy area.
On the contrary, Japanese emissions trading systems are more voluntary because of the design based on voluntary actions by business sectors.
The
Ministry of Environment could have never taken the initiative to introduce stricter emissions trading because of the opposition from business interests.
The case in Japan corresponds to the conventional view that business interests have more political influence than environmental interests.
While in the literature of environmental politics the role of environmentally motivated actors (e.g. environmental groups, governmental ministries, political parties, epistemic communities and so on) has been emphasized in explaining the different level of regulation in environmental policy measures, this article focuses more on the attitude of business interests toward climate policies.
If business interests are more open to environmental norms, environmental policy measures would be more regulative, and vice versa.
What determines the attitude of business interests as a whole toward climate policies? Though both in the EU and Japan cross-sectoral peak associations represent business interests in policy processes, we can find two types of peak association.
One is “corporate associations” representing the voices of member industries and companies.
The other is “executive associations”, the member of which is corporate executives as an individual.
They do not necessarily represent the voices of industries and companies.
Because of this difference in organizational structure, executive associations can be more open to longer-term interests including environmental norms than corporate associations can.
From this inference this article argues as follows: because the executive association has more presence than the corporate association, the EU has been enthusiastically committed to climate policies and introduced relatively strict emissions trading system.
On the contrary, in Japan because the corporate association has more presence than the executive association climate policies have been placed as secondary and emissions trading systems remain to be more voluntary.