Carbon quotas, a (green, glowing) silver lining

In order to combat climate change the UK has offered to cut 20% of its C02 production from electricity generation. However the EU commission are not satisfied with us missing these unnecessacary quotas, they want even stricter quotas to miss which will require restrictions on all aspects of life rather than just how electricity is put onto the grid. If you look hard enough then every cloud can have a silver lining, and even with this there could be one good outcome. This is because of the way the EU normally works, that is in the French national interest.

Currently the case nuclear power is classed with coal and gas as a non-renewable fuel that has to pay the climate change levy despite not producing any greenhouse gases and there being supplies enough to last beyond any sensible planning horizon. France currently creates 75% of all its electricity by nuclear power which is a very popular policy, so under the current classification they are going to have to get rid of a large number of them and replace them with windmills which are considerably more expensive and less reliable than nuclear. However should France be able to get nuclear reclassified along with the renewables as not contributing to climate change then it will already have far suppased its quota and be in a position to make a shed load of money from selling power to other countries not so blessed by the mighty atom. This is not as unlikely as it sounds having both logic (since nuclear power does not contribute to climate change) and more important the French national interest on its side.

Not that quotas or supranational organisation is needed in order to tackle climate change in the optimal way. Pigou taxes and the market can handle searching out the socially optimum levels of CO2 production far more efficiently and precisely than the sledge hammer of bureaucratic guessing.