Distributional Choices in EU Climate Change Law and Policy

This thesis analyses, from the perspective of legal principles, choices made in EU law concerning the distribution of benefits and costs arising from climate change policies. It recommends making a number of changes to EU climate change law, to reduce tensions between choices and principles. Examples are: review EU policy on biofuels, particularly in relation to imported biofuels; review the approach of the EU to burden sharing between Member States, to ensure that old Member States do not profit from past inactions; monitor closely the interactions that may take place among mitigation measures recently adopted, in order to swiftly correct undesired (distributional) impacts; reconsider the EU approach to burden sharing at international level, in particular the equal per capita approach, and start considering at theoretical level the feasibility of EU-wide personal carbon trading.