Free Republic

* ICE to cut around half of 50-person CCX workforce * 1st round of layoffs began July 23, more to come in autumn * Sources cite U.S. climate inaction as main reason for cuts * ICE collecting feedback on what to do with climate bourse By Michael Szabo LONDON, Aug 11 (Reuters) - Market operator Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE.N) is laying off staff at newly acquired U.S. environmental bourse the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), industry sources told Reuters, citing a lack of U.S. action on climate change. They said the first round of layoffs began on July 23 and, although...

A U.N. warning that Himalayan glaciers were melting fast and may be gone by 2035 was not backed up by science, U.N. climate experts admitted Wednesday Global Warming: The scientists who said that Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 have admitted the claim has as much credibility as sightings of the mythical Yeti. It's their fraudulent claims that are melting away. We hesitate to call it Glacier-gate, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body tasked with scaring us to death about global warming, has admitted that the claim in its 2007 report about the Himalayan...

Climategate-I was the revelation that climate scientists crusading over global warming at East Anglia University had tried to censor inconvenient 1.jpg data and shut dissenters out of academic journals. Climategate-II is the revelation that the 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change, saying Himalayan glaciers might disappear by 2035, was not science at all but idle, unsubstantiated speculation. It speaks volumes for the huge biases within IPCC that it took two years for this hoax to be exposed. Any hoax opposing the global warming thesis would be exposed in ten seconds flat. The IPCC is willing to swallow...

With a reach across the political divide for Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman as ambassador to China, President Barack Obama may have sidelined for now a potentially formidable Republican moderate and possible White House challenger in 2012. ... Huntsman, 49, is fluent in Mandarin Chinese from his days as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan. He previously served as U.S. ambassador to Singapore and as a deputy U.S. trade ambassador. ...As ambassador, Huntsman could play a critical role in getting China to sign onto a new international agreement to curb the emissions blamed for global warming. The Obama administration has said it...

...There is a very impressive consensus now emerging around the world that the solutions to the economic crisis are also the solutions to the climate crisis," he says. "I actually think we will get an agreement at Copenhagen." ..."[Obama's election] is one of the main factors," he says. "But we also have a big ally in reality the planet is under assault. This collision with human civilisation ... is increasingly dire." ... Gore says he has also detected a shift in the view of many business leaders. "They're seeing the writing on every wall they look at. They're seeing the...

Europe's carbon trading scheme has proved to be "disastrous" and a "scam" in which companies have profited with no effect on emissions... The environmentalist James Lovelock — who developed the Gaia theory of the planet as a "living organism" — and the former environment minister, Michael Meacher, said... "In principle [carbon trading] is not a bad idea but in operation it's been disastrous. Business has frankly made billions out of artificial reductions of what is called hot air with absolutely no environmental benefit at all," said Meacher, singling out the ETS for being distorted by commerce. "Governments under pressure from...

...Gore showed up on Capitol Hill with an updated version of his 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," including time-lapsed photos of melting glaciers.. He also urged Congress to consider a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide emissions, whereby the government caps the amount of carbon that can be emitted by businesses. Those that produce less carbon earn credits that can be sold to businesses that produce more carbon. Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican who holds the Tennessee Senate seat once held by Gore, suggested that a carbon tax, refunded to companies that produce less carbon, would be a better avenue. Gore...

What is the connection between the bankrupt Lehman Brothers and the likelihood that in four years' time our electricity bills will jump another 25 per cent (on top of the rises likely from soaring coal and gas prices)? The answer is that, before its collapse, Lehman was pitching to become the leader in the vast trade created by the new worldwide regulatory system to "fight climate change" by curbing emissions of carbon dioxide. The biggest money-spinners will be the schemes whereby industry will pay for permits to emit CO2 at so much a ton, either directly to governments or by...

LONDON, June 9 - The World Bank on Monday priced a $25 million bond linked to United Nations-approved carbon emission offset credits, the market's first such bond, lead manager Daiwa Securities SMBC Europe said. Payments on the bond are linked to Certified Emissions Reduction credits , which are issued under the Clean Development Mechanism, a trading scheme that allows rich nations to invest in clean energy projects in developing countries. Trade in CERs, which holders can either sell for profit or use to meet emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol, more than doubled to $13 billion last year, according to...

LONDON (Thomson Financial) - Generation Investment Management, the private equity fund chaired by former U.S. vice president Al Gore, has acquired a 9.5 percent stake in Camco International Ltd, a carbon asset developer. Generation, set up in 2004 by Gore and David Blood, former chief of Goldman Sachs's asset management arm, now holds 16 million Camco shares, Camco said in a statement. Camco, which has one of the world's largest carbon credit portfolios, works with companies to identify and develop projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and then arranges the sale and delivery of carbon credits.

The investment vehicle headed by Al Gore has closed a new $683m fund to invest in early-stage environmental companies and has mounted a robust defence of green investing. The Climate Solutions Fund will be one of the biggest in the growing market for investment funds with an environmental slant. The fund will be focused on equity investments in small companies in four sectors: renewable energy; energy efficiency technologies; energy from biofuels and biomass; and the carbon trading markets. This is the second fund from Generation Investment Management, chaired by the former vice-president of the US and managed by David Blood,...

he globe is warming quickly. Congress is moving slowly. 's the idea behind a new study from a team of researchers at the University of Colorado law school, who worked full time for nearly six months on a project that could help the next U.S. president make sweeping climate-change policies -- fast. The new report probes the edges of executive orders and lays out the authority the next president could use to introduce global-warming policies without waiting for legislation to wind its way through the notoriously slow congressional machine. "Given the extreme importance of climate change, this is a way...

TORSHAVN (AFP) - Nobel Peace Prize-winner and former US vice president Al Gore said Monday that he believes Washington will sign up to a new climate change treaty in Copenhagen in 2009. ADVERTISEMENT "The United States will definitely join the next treaty," Gore said at a conference on global warming and rising oceans in the Faroe Islands. "The good news is that after the next (presidential, November 2008) elections, we will have a new politics." The United States was the only industrialised economy not to sign up to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but a new deal has to be agreed...

BISMARCK — The North Dakota Public Service Commission got a walk-through Wednesday of the congressional bill that would create a “cap and trade” system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. Some don’t like what they’ve learned. It’s the Lieberman-Warner bill, which is expected to be debated in the Senate in June. It would set up a system in which coal-fired plants, farms, industrial processors, manufacturers, utility companies and others will be issued a set number of allowances which will then be decreased over the next few decades to match the decrease in their emissions, until 2031, when their...

Sen. John McCain and his staff have been adamant for days that his upcoming overseas trip to Britain, France and Israel is not political. /snip ...Apparently, though, there will still be room for fundraising. McCain's campaign has sent out an invitation for a March 20 luncheon at Spencer House -- the neo-classical home built for an ancestor of Diana, the late Princess of Wales -- "by kind permission of Lord Rothschild OM GBE and the Hon. Nathaniel Rothschild." The price to attend is $1000 to $2,300. And the dress code for the event? "Lounge suits" -- British for business...

NUSA DUA, Indonesia, Dec 7 - Traders are already betting on a new global climate deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, as talks in Bali on Friday inched towards a two-year negotiating agenda for an expanded global climate pact. Financiers are buying rights to emit planet-warming greenhouses gases after present Kyoto commitments expire in 2012, hoping that countries will agree new, tougher emissions limits -- and drive demand for such permits. "It's a great bet," said one trader attending the talks on the tropical Indonesian island. The new, more speculative offsets came at a substantial discount, the trader, who declined...