Between 2023 and 2025, the European Union permanently destroyed 3.17 billion emission allowances: 2.52 billion on 1 January 2023, 382 million in 2024, 271 million in 2025. More than three years of emissions from the installations covered, removed from the world.
On 1 April 2026, the Commission proposed to stop that mechanism. The same day, the price of the allowance rose.
the European allowance on 1 April 2026, a seven-week high, reached on the day the Commission proposed to end the invalidation of surplus allowances
On 17 July the Commission presented an overhaul slowing the annual cap reduction to 3.7% from 2031 to 2035, then 1.7% from 2036. Six days later the allowance passed €85, the highest since January. In both cases analysts explain the rise by a reading: Brussels appeared less interventionist than feared. The price of an allowance does not measure the scarcity of the allowance: it measures what the market reads into an intention.
A Stradivarius is scarce because Antonio Stradivari is dead. A 2009 bitcoin is scarce because the block has passed. A Yap stone is scarce because the crossing was lethal. An allowance is scarce because a legislature decided so.
The previous eight issues dealt with objects whose scarcity was a fact. Here is an object whose scarcity is a decision.
In 2013 the surplus exceeded 2.1 billion allowances. After 900 million were backloaded from auctions (400 in 2014, 300 in 2015, 200 in 2016), about 1.78 billion remained in 2015. In 2024, 1.148 billion. In 2025 the official indicator stands at 1,023,494,202 allowances.
Thirteen years of correction, three billion allowances destroyed, and the surplus still exceeds a full year of covered emissions. Scarcity was never reached: it was postponed.
190,494,202 allowances will be withdrawn from auctions between 1 September 2026 and 31 August 2027. That figure is not an estimate: it is exactly 1,023,494,202 minus 833 million, the threshold written into the Decision. The register is exact to the single allowance; it is the threshold it applies that can change.
A Yap stone carried the name of the man who brought it back. A 2009 bitcoin carries its block height. An allowance carries no name: it is bought, held for a few years at most, then surrendered to the authority that issued it, and cancelled. Its trajectory does not run from one owner to the next; it runs from the issuer back to the issuer.
The first phase showed what that link is worth. Allowances from 2005 to 2007 could not be banked into the next phase, and their price fell to near zero by the end of 2007. An object you cannot inherit is worth nothing the day you can no longer hand it back.
1 April 2026: the Commission proposes to end the invalidation of surplus allowances.
This is the only full axis. The allowance has a clear, public narrative, adopted by a Parliament: make emitting costly in order to make it scarce. That narrative is coherent, written, dated, and verifiable line by line in the Official Journal.
But it does not carry the price. On 1 April, then in the days after the 17 July presentation, the price rose on two announcements that loosened the constraint. The narrative states the direction; the price listens to the calendar.
The European allowance is twenty-one years old. The stability reserve that governs its supply was decided in 2015, established in 2018, operational in 2019. The invalidation mechanism, the one that made destruction irreversible, has existed only since 2023 and could disappear before its tenth birthday.
The seniority of an allowance is measured neither in centuries nor in block heights: it is measured in legislatures.
Scarcity decreed and revisable, transmission that always returns to the issuer, twenty-one years of seniority: three axes out of four depend on a vote. Only the narrative holds, and it is precisely the one that does not carry the price.
In its text of 1 April 2026, the Commission writes that the reserve should hold more than the current 400 million limit, to allow releases that balance the market. The scarcity mechanism becomes a liquidity mechanism. That is this issue's sentence, written by the European Commission.