The employers' group, IBEC, has given a cautious welcome to the emissions trading proposals although it says it continues to have "huge concerns" about the planned environmental initiative.
Mr Donal Buckley, head of IBEC's environmental unit, said the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, had addressed "some" of its concerns in the package announced yesterday. "But it's too early to say whether this is a good or bad decision, or whether more allowances should have been issued."
Mr Buckley stressed that Ireland was competing against countries which were not carbon-restrained, and "we need to be very wary of exporting jobs."
Some 110 installations, run by 70 companies, will be covered by the regime. When the emissions trading market is up and running in January 2005, these firms will be competing against 12,000 EU installations.
This, said Mr Buckley, could cause the price of allowances quickly to reach the penalty price of €40 a tonne, rising to €100 a tonne after the Kyoto Treaty was ratified.
"We just don't know what will happen because it is an experiment. So we need to go forward slowly, carefully and pragmatically."
He added that the Government needed to target the other two-thirds of carbon emissions in the State through other initiatives. Agriculture, which is excluded from the emissions trading regime, accounts for about one-third of CO2 emissions, and for sizeable amounts of other greenhouse gases like methane.
