Introduction

Abstract In this introductory chapter, we describe the goals of the workshop in Venice that has led to this collection of essays and give a brief overview over the individual chapters in this book. We divide them into four different thematic sections that focus, respectively, on the current state and the development of the EU ETS (Section I); aspects related to political economy in the sense that firms aim to influence climate regulation (Section II); interactions with parallel instruments of climate policy (Section III); and firm behavior in the emissions market (Section IV). We provide some general and mostly positive conclusions about the EU ETS as a policy experiment, but argue that in order for it to provide a significant contribution to combatting climate change, the future cap should be tightened.