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http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-16/poland-may-seek-5-5-increase-in-its-eu-carbon-quota-update1-.html

Poland may seek a 5.5 percent increase its carbon-dioxide emission quota under the European Union’s cap-and-trade system after an EU court overturned limits imposed by the bloc’s regulator.

Poland, whose current annual emissions cap is 208.5 million tons, may “try to squeeze 220 million tons” in negotiations with the European Commission, Environment Minister Andrzej Kraszewski said today in an interview in Radio PiN. The central European country originally sought a 284.6 million-ton annual maximum for the period from 2008 through 2012, a request that the EU regulator rejected, prompting Poland to sue.
Since court verdicts in September 2009 struck down the commission’s decisions on pollution limits for Poland and Estonia, the EU’s executive has been scrambling to protect the bloc’s emissions-trading program and prevent an oversupply of permits. It has said that any review of allocations to those countries would probably result in the same limits because industrial discharges were reduced by the recession.
“It’s a fact that we won a case against the commission, but it doesn’t mean that we can reach our dream quotas,” Kraszewski said. “The commission has its arguments, I love negotiations, and we’ll see how they go, but surely it won’t be 280 million tons.”

‘Very Restricted’

The EU lower court said the commission has “very restricted” authority to review national plans for allocating carbon allowances. In response, the EU appealed the verdicts for Poland and Estonia in December, saying the court “has interpreted too narrowly the power of the commission.”
Until any new EU decisions on their national allocation plans, the two countries aren’t allowed to issue additional permits, according to the commission. Poland’s annual cap of 208.5 million tons in 2008-2012 represents about 10 percent of the overall EU limit on energy and manufacturing companies in the system, the world’s biggest carbon market.
EU permits for December rose as much as 1.5 percent to 13.33 euros a metric ton today on London’s European Climate Exchange. They are down 12 percent in the past six months amid concerns about oversupply and the failure of the global climate change summit in Copenhagen in December to set binding emission- reduction targets.
The commission wants to convince Poland that its court victory doesn’t justify a higher carbon ceiling because of the need for stability in the bloc’s emissions-trading system, Jos Delbeke, the commission’s deputy director general for environment, said in November. Any reassessment of the current cap may justify a tighter limit because of emission reductions resulting from the economic slump, he said.