"For a revision of the draft plan, one issue is key: Germany has to stand up for a CO2 minimum price in the ETS," says Edenhofer, who's also a Professor at Technical University Berlin and Director at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change. "Such a minimum price sets incentives for innovation, it makes burning fossil fuels more expensive, and it is a precondition for a German exit from coal. Without a minimum price, German national emissions reductions would only allow European neighbours to emit more greenhouse gases, that's how the ETS currently is constructed. Without a minimum price we will not see enough investments into clean technologies. It's up to us to transform the European emissions trading into an effective instrument of climate stabilization. A reformed EU ETS could then be a model for other emission trading systems that are currently being installed in many parts of the world."
