Twenty-five Member States of the European Union have provided twenty-five public policy experiments in creating and distributing rights to emit carbon to emitters constituting a significant portion of their economies. This presentation will report observations from research concerning the allocation of European Union Allowances (EUAs) in the first round of National Allocation Plans of the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading Scheme. The presentation will stress what can be learned from these real experiments, not on what should have happened according to some pre-determined criterion.