Posted on 06/06/2004 9:06:16 PM PDT by take
Brokers gather to trade emissions credits
As carbon dioxide emissions continue to be a problem, Europe takes the lead in the fight against global warming.
Buyers, sellers, brokers and lawyers, even ''specialists in carbon asset creation management,'' convene Wednesday on the banks of the Rhine to launch a new business for a worried world.
CarbonExpo, in the cavernous congress halls of Cologne, Germany, is a three-day trade fair for those who would deal in carbon dioxide -- buying and selling permits to discharge the waste gas chiefly blamed for global warming.
This carbon trading is a Europe-wide effort to use supply-and-demand to control emissions and protect the climate, in the spirit of the Kyoto Protocol.
But the supply far outstrips demand, Europeans are finding. The climate of this marketplace itself is decidedly cloudy. Advance prices have plunged by half.
''At this point, one shouldn't portray it as a liquid, vibrant market,'' said Atle C. Christiansen of PointCarbon, a Norway-based research firm.
More than six years after governments negotiated the historic climate accord in Kyoto, Japan, the world is taking only halting steps -- not always forward, never in unison -- to follow through.
In fact, the Kyoto treaty itself is not yet in force, since it hasn't been ratified, as required, by industrial countries emitting a total of 55 percent of ''greenhouse gases,'' such as carbon dioxide, that trap heat in the atmosphere that Earth otherwise would give off.
GROWING CONCERNS
Russia's expected accession later this year would clear the 55 percent hurdle. But even a functioning Kyoto agreement would have little impact: Its limited reductions would barely slow the greenhouse buildup, and the biggest emitter, the United States, would remain outside the treaty.
Scientists, meanwhile, grow increasingly concerned.
''If carbon dioxide had a color, if people saw the sky getting darker, people would have no problem recognizing what's going on,'' said climatologist David Pierce of San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
What's going on is that the world's daily output of man-made carbon dioxide, from burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels, is 11 percent greater today than a decade ago. Under Kyoto, industrial nations were actually supposed to be cutting back greenhouse gas discharges to 8 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2012. The planet, meanwhile, is warming. Global temperatures rose almost 1 degree Fahrenheit from 1981 to 1998, NASA scientists report.
If greenhouse emissions aren't cut back soon, temperatures could rise many degrees more, expanding oceans, causing drought, intensifying storms and altering climate in other ways, say scientists of the U.N.-organized Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
As the mercury rose in recent years, so did U.S. political opposition -- especially from the Bush administration -- to reducing power-plant and car-exhaust emissions, imposing energy taxes or taking other steps to try to stabilize the atmosphere. Higher energy and other costs would seriously damage the economy, it was said.
Economic analyses ranged widely, from a projected annual cost of $112 per U.S. family to comply with Kyoto, to $2,700 a family, with heavy U.S. job losses. Environmentalists said dire projections didn't factor in the costs -- to coastal states, agriculture and other sectors -- of doing nothing, or the job growth in new energy industries.
''It is hard to think of a public policy issue that is harder than this one,'' said American economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, who has studied climate's complexities.
PROFIT MOTIVES
But he and others say any ultimate plan must include ''cap-and-trade'' -- schemes whereby emissions caps are imposed, and companies that emit less gas than allowed can sell unused allotments to others who overshoot the target. The profit motive is expected to drive efforts and technology to rein in emissions.
''Market incentives on this can be enormously powerful,'' Sachs told an April symposium at New York's Columbia University, where he heads the Earth Institute.
Europe's ''cap-and-trade'' is by far the biggest and most ambitious.
''We want to demonstrate that this works, using market-based tools,'' the European Union's environment commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, told The Associated Press.
The EU's 25 nations, whose leaders claim a ''special responsibility'' to lead on climate with Washington on the sidelines, ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002 and put its provisions into European law.
GREEN COMMODITY REGISTRIES
Our mission is to provide national authorities with dependable business solutions for tracking the ownership of emission allowances and green certificates.
http://www.grexel.com/
Greenies finally break into serious money.
Summit: Carbon Dioxide Traders
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,63739,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3
I hope all these hockey pucks go broke on their horsehockey monkeybusiness!!!
The only Americans that are going for this are the steaming pile of Socialists, EnvironMentalists and the Art Bell crowd!!!
Washington under growing domestic pressure on climate change
The US government is coming under increasing pressure from its own companies to sign up to the Kyoto protocol on climate change, EU Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstroem said.
“Slowly but steadily things are also changing in the US,” she told reporters. “It is coming from the bottom up. There are also big American companies or multinational companies (which) look to Europe. “They understand that they will have to do something about greenhouse (gas) emissions and climate change.
There is a completely different scenario and political understanding of this problem,” the Swedish official said. US President George W Bush in one of his first acts on taking office, turned his back on the Kyoto protocol in March 2001 arguing the commitments it enforced on industrialised nations would be too costly for the US economy.
After the US withdrawal, Russia now holds the agreement’s future in its hands under its complex ratification arithmetic. Under the protocol, countries are supposed to slash their emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in a bid to stop the warming of the earth’s atmosphere. In February the US Defense Department downplayed a report on climate change that it had commissioned that warned that abrupt climate change “could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy” as countries war over dwindling resources.
Wallstroem said: “But from the administration of course we have no other signals... But ultimately, they will have to and especially if a majority of countries around the world will actually ratify the Kyoto protocol.” afp
“Slowly but steadily things are also changing in the US,” she told reporters. “It is coming from the bottom up. There are also big American companies or multinational companies (which) look to Europe. “They understand that they will have to do something about greenhouse (gas) emissions and climate change.
Wallstrom said U.S. companies and states were showing a commitment to reducing emissions that hurt the environment. She cited an initiative among some northeastern U.S. states and provinces of Canada to start an emissions trading system as an example of the change.
Anyone who is dumb-enough to believe that buying permission to continue polluting, from 3rd world countries who have no restrictions on their own ability to pollute, would somehow lower pollution...is a person who would likewise think that buying permission to speed on our highways from felons inside their prison cells would somehow lower the number of traffic deaths.
Are you in favor of this pantload?
World Trade Organisation (WTO)
Are you ok? Seriously, are you???
Brokers gather to trade emissions credits
I wonder if this means that they were grading each other's fratulence on a environmental scale of 1-10.
NO
New World Order Rising? - Thoughts on the UN World Summit on Sustainable Developmenthttp://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/743512/posts?page=10
Can you say dot.com bubble?
Sooner or later they are going to decide that all those billions of Carbon Dioxide emitters (people) are going to have to be cut back to "save the planet".
I had nacturnal emmissions once. I never dreamed anyone would want to trade 'em in for anything...
Well, I guess they forgot to mention that India and China and a bunch of other big emitters would "remain outside the treaty". Just an oversight I guess.
WHEW! You had me worried for a minute, there!!! You kept posting excerps of this tripe without any comment of your own as to your opinion and I thought maybe you were pushing it like Art Bell and George Norrie just to see how much of this pungent recycled horse manure we would take before giving you a required revolting response!!!
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