Guest Speaker - Professor Michael Grubb

Summary

Carbon pricing is the ‘first among equals’ in a broad triad of climate policy mechanism for cutting CO2 emissions, but is also the most politically difficult. This talk will briefly review the role of carbon pricing, the debates between taxation and emissions trading as a way of achieving it, and some of the key lessons learned from the European Emissions Trading Scheme which is now in its seventh year.  The talk will then focus on the concerns around carbon intensive sectors, and appropriate treatment of them that recognises the inevitably evolutionary nature of international participation, combined with the need for incentives to broaden international action.

Biography

Professor Michael Grubb is Chair of the international research organization Climate Strategies, headquartered at Cambridge University where he is also a Senior Research Associate at the Faculty of Economics. He is a leading expert in industry competitiveness under the EU ETS and has been leading research on industrial competitiveness and carbon leakage for the last four years. His former positions include Chief Economist at the Carbon Trust, Professor of Climate Change and Energy Policy at Imperial College London, and head of Energy and Environment at Chatham House, and he continues to be associated with these institutions. In 2008 he was appointed to the UK Climate Change Committee, established under the UK Climate Change Bill to advise the government on future carbon budgets and to report to Parliament on their implementation.

Michael Grubb is author of seven books, fifty journal research articles and numerous other publications. He has held numerous advisory positions with governments, companies and international studies on climate change and energy policy, and has been a Lead Author for several reports of the IPCC on mitigation, including the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.  He is editor-in-chief of the journal Climate Policy and is on the editorial board of Energy Policy.  His most recent works have been directing Climate Strategies research on competitiveness dimensions of the EU ETS, now extending into analysis of EU ETS design and impacts to 2020; and editing a book A low carbon electricity system for the UK: technology, economics and policy (Cambridge University Press, May 2008).

Thursday, 14 April, 2011 - 6:30-8:00pm

Carrillo Gantner Theatre
Sidney Myer Asia Centre
The University of Melbourne