News | Energy Efficiency

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-26/excess-emission-rights-are-flaw-of-kyoto-climate-treaty-eu-official-says.html

Surplus emission rights granted to nations are a “major flaw” of the climate-protection Kyoto Protocol that must be solved if the treaty is to be extended beyond 2012, a senior European Union official said.

“We’re talking about 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide; compare that to the entire EU emissions trading system that is hardly 2 billion tons,” Jos Delbeke, director general for climate at the European Commission, told a seminar in Brussels today.
Delbeke said climate negotiators worldwide should discuss whether the surplus Assigned Amount Units, known as AAUs, are not “a sort of thing that belongs to the history rather than to the future of the Kyoto Protocol.”
“It is true that there are different opinions in Europe because lots of our new member states are having parts of these AAUs,” he said. “What we’re telling our new member states is that this is an internal question, we can deal with those AAUs internally in the EU and this should be dissociated from the international negotiations stance that we’re taking.”