From the New York Times Green, Inc Blog: The banking giant HSBC removed two companies involved in carbon trading from its Climate Change Index on Monday because they had lost too much value. Analysts from HSBC said the cause was mainly that governments had failed to come up with a timetable for a global climate deal at the United Nations summit in Copenhagen in December. “Carbon trading was the major loser from Copenhagen,” HSBC analysts said in their March 2010 Quarterly Index Review. ‘Cap and trade needs hard targets and …
As of late, when it comes to policymaking in Washington D.C., the trendy thing to do has been to point to Europe. Our Members of Congress are doing it with two of the largest reform policies currently on the table: health care and energy. With regards to energy, advocates of a cap and trade program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions say if Europe can do it, so can we. But the reality is, we’re lucky Europe’s gone through with a cap and trade program, because it is a perfect example …
If former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, the greenest of all the greens, the man who played an integral role in starting the Environmental Protection Agency and passing the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, opposes cap and trade, it’s probably not a good idea. Here’s what Nader told the New York Times concerning cap and trade: I mean, it’s not going to work. It’s too complex. It’s too easily manipulated politically. Right now, they’re having a battle over whether they can even auction the credits off for money. The industry …
Literally: “Anti-Mafia magistrates in Sicily have opened a sweeping investigation into the wind power sector where local officials, entrepreneurs and crime gangs are suspected of collusion in the construction of lucrative wind farms before their eventual sale to multinational companies. Italian and EU subsidies for the building of wind farms and the world’s highest guaranteed rates, ($240 per kwh), for the electricity they produce have turned southern Italy into a highly attractive market exploited by organised crime. Prosecutors suspect the hand of the Mafia in fixing permits and building wind …
In the UK Guardian last month, a leading European energy executive warned that Europe’s carbon market was becoming a “new type of sub-prime tool.” More analysis from the article: The EU’s emissions trading scheme was set up as a market solution to cut greenhouse gas pollution from industry. Polluters were issued with permits that can be traded between companies and countries as a way of encouraging an overall reduction in carbon output. However, companies are now cashing them in. Up to €1bn-worth of permits are said to have been sold …
Apparently people forgot to mention to the central planners in Europe that prices fall during a recession. That includes carbon prices: Set up to price pollution out of existence, carbon trading is pricing it back in. Europe’s carbon markets are in collapse. A year ago European governments allocated a limited number of carbon emission permits to their big [emitters]. Businesses that reduce pollution are allowed to sell spare permits to ones that need more. As demand outstrips this capped supply, and the price of permits rises, an incentive grows to …
Vincent de Rivaz, CEO of the UK arm EDF energy, made an interesting but frightening comparison when talking about trading carbon credits under the European Union’s cap-and-trade program: We like certainty about a carbon price. [But] the carbon price has to become simple and not become a new type of sub-prime tool which will be diverted from what is its initial purpose: to encourage real investment in real low-carbon technology. We are at the tipping point where we … should wonder if we have in place the right balance between …
