- My role today is to explain to you the alternative proposals that the President has presented to Prime Minister Tusk ahead of the upcoming European Council, in accordance with the law on cooperation between the Council of Ministers and the President, as well as the Sejm and Senate. This is in the event that a majority to abolish the ETS cannot be formed. We have five concrete proposals - Wanda Buk said at a press conference.

- These are not proposals of a cosmetic or superficial nature, because after 20 years of the ETS's operation and based on the data presented to you by Minister Rabenda, there is no longer time for such measures. The first of them is the introduction of a substitute fee. Today, the situation is such that entrepreneurs buy emission allowances on the stock exchange - it's a standard financial instrument - they buy it on the primary market or from financial institutions. On the secondary market, Poland is a net payer. This means that Polish entrepreneurs pay more for emission allowances than ultimately goes into our budget - she continued.

- We propose to replace this financial instrument, whose value is unlimited and whose volatility is completely uncontrolled, or rather, to enable our entrepreneurs, as well as European entrepreneurs, to pay a so-called substitute fee into the budgets of individual member states. The substitute fee would not exceed the cost of the lowest ETS system in the world. The minister did not mention this, but I think it is worth noting that the EU's ETS system is the most expensive system worldwide, ten times more expensive on average than the Chinese system and more than half as expensive as the Californian system - she emphasized.

"The second proposal is to introduce a CO2 price limit within the Market Stability Reserve system. This is a mechanism designed to stabilize prices. Introduced in 2015 to the ETS system, it basically works by withdrawing allowances from the market when there are too many and the price is too low. Conversely, if there are too few allowances and the price is too high, additional allowances are released. Unfortunately, this mechanism works poorly. Why? Because it is linked to the volume of allowances on the market, not actual price increases. It's like having a thermostat that reacts to how much fuel is in the furnace, rather than the room temperature.

We propose to turn the MSR system into a well-functioning thermostat. If the EU allowance price exceeds EUR 10 per tonne of emissions, additional allowances should be released onto the market. The third pillar is the end of speculation. From the very beginning, the ETS system was designed as a financial instrument. You often hear that it is a para-tax, and this is an accurate definition or formulation because it effectively has all the characteristics of a tax. However, in 2005, when these regulations were adopted, we were unable to – the European Union was unable to achieve unanimity. Therefore, it was proposed to bypass the regulations related to introducing a new tax into the European Union by formulating it as a financial instrument. What does this mean? It means that today, the majority of those who profit from allowances are financial institutions that trade these allowances for future gains. We propose to exclude financial institutions that do not contribute to decarbonization in any way, but rather prey not only on household budgets but also on industry and our future. The fourth solution is free allowances, and limiting their phasing out.

Energy-intensive industries are not just industries that pay for energy. Along with ETS costs. Energy-intensive industries are also obliged to offset the emissions they produce. Until now, energy-intensive industries have had the option of using so-called free allowances. However, the Commission has now decided that since the CBAM border tax has been introduced, we can phase out these free allowances. The problem, however, is that CBAM does not work, that it does not cover the entire supply chain. It is very easy to circumvent. Phasing out free allowances, as the minister said, will result in an additional several billion zlotys for our industry annually that it will have to bear.

We propose to abandon the phasing out of free allowances. The last pillar, and this is no longer optional, unlike the previous proposals, is the abandonment of the ETS2 system.”