Live Debate: EU Emissions Trading Scheme: fit for purpose?

Peter Liese is a German Christian-Democrat member of the European Parliament. He sits on the environment, public health and food safety committee.

A medical doctor with a specialization in human genetics, he developed an early interest for politics. After joining the Christian-Democratic Youth in 1984, and the CDU in 1987, he was elected a member of the city council of Bestwig, in North Rhine Westphalia in 1989. In 1994, he was elected to the European Parliament.

He is one of the European People’s Party (EPP) group’s co-ordinators in the environment, public health and food safety committee. He drafted the opinion report of the environment committee on the energy efficiency directive. He was rapporteur on the inclusion of aviation in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

He studied medicine in Marburg, Aachen and Bonn, and completed his specialization at the human genetics institute of the University of Bonn, Germany.

Jos Delbeke is director-general for climate action in the European Commission, a position he has held since 2010.

Before the creation of the climate action department, he was deputy director-general for the environment (2008-2010).

He was closely involved in negotiations on the package on climate change and energy with the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. He has also been a key player in developing Europe’s international climate change strategy, its legislation on cars and fuels, the European emissions trading scheme (ETS), and legislation on air quality and emissions from big industrial installations.

He joined the European Commission in 1986 and worked on marketbased instruments, on cost-benefit analysis, and on the new chemicals legislation REACH. For several years he was the European Commission’s chief negotiator at the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties.

Born in 1958, he holds a doctorate in economics and has lectured at the University of Louvain in Belgium.

Baroness Bryony Worthington is the founder of Sandbag, a not-for-profit organisation focused on raising awareness about emissions trading and lobbying to improve its effectiveness, which she established in 2008.

Her environmental commitment began at Operation Raleigh, a UK sustainable development charity, where she worked as a fundraiser. She later moved to work for Friends of the Earth as a climate change campaigner. There, she authored the first report to introduce and champion the concept of ‘carbon budgeting’. She then worked for the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, implementing public awareness campaigns and helping draft the UK Climate Change Bill, before becoming head of government relations for Scottish and Southern Energy, an energy company, where she also acted as an adviser to the CEO. She left to form Sandbag in 2008. She is also patron of the Weinberg Foundation dedicated to promoting safer, cheaper nuclear power.

She was raised to the peerage as Baroness Worthington, of Cambridge in the County of Cambridgeshire, in 2011, and sits on the Labour benches in the House of Lords.

She holds a degree in English Literature from Queens’ College, Cambridge.

Robert Jan Jeekel is Director, Energy & Climate Change Policy at Eurometaux, the European sector federation representing the EU nonferrous metals industries. He has been working here for about seven years, focusing on energy and climate issues.

For the EU emissions trading scheme, he is the sector’s key interlocutor in the negotiations on benchmarks, free ETS allowance rules, the review of the carbon leakage list, and DG Competition state aid guidelines for the financial compensation of CO2 costs in electricity prices.

He is also the sector’s main interlocutor on the energy efficiency directive, the wide range of proposals for a ‘2050 Low Carbon Roadmap’ and other unilateral EU greenhouse targets, the new renewables policy, and the Energy Taxation Review. He also represents the non-ferrous industries in other circles, like BusinessEurope, BIAC/OECD, the Alliance of Energy Intensive Industries, IFIEC, and conferences such as this one.

Prior to this, he held public affairs functions for the Dutch industrial federation and the EU American Chamber of Commerce.

He studied international relations at the University of Groningen, NL, and Business Economics at the VUB, Belgium.

David Hone works for Royal Dutch Shell and is the senior climate change adviser in the Shell CO2 team, a position he has held since 2001.

He joined Shell in 1980, to work as a refinery engineer, first in Australia, later in the Netherlands, before becoming the supply economist at the Shell refinery in Sydney. In 1989 he transferred to London to work as an oil trader in Shell Trading and held a number of senior positions in that organisation until 2001.

He is currently the chairman of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), a global business organisation of some 160 companies that focuses on the development of carbon markets. He works closely with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and has been a lead author of a number of its climate change publications.

He graduated as a chemical engineer from the University of Adelaide in South Australia.

Simon Taylor is European Voice’s news editor, responsible for editorial content of the newspaper and website. Before being promoted to news editor in January 2010, he was senior reporter at European Voice, covering political affairs and energy policy, from March 2006.

He is a regular commentator on the BBC and other international media on EU affairs. Simon has also worked for the Sunday Times and Guardian newspapers.

He is a graduate in French and German from Cambridge University.