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fb101
Administrator
USA
2856 Posts |
 Posted - 12/12/2008 : 05:35:32
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Carbon credits
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Excerpts:
We are witnessing the birth of the greatest and most complex commodity market the world has seen. Last year alone, permits worth more than £55 billion were traded on the world’s carbon markets – but future trading volumes, if all goes global according to plan, will dwarf these.
Permits are bought from governments or from carbon traders, who, naturally, charge a commission. For the City the arrival of carbon trading is a bonanza. The sector already employs about 3,000 people and has created a few dozen new millionaires.
It sounds good news for everyone: governments, taxpayers, City boys and the environment. The reality is a great deal less rosy – indeed some of those closest to the carbon markets say openly that the system is doomed to failure.
Many carbon traders believe they could make the system work but fear the politicians who oversee it will never dare put a sufficiently high price on carbon emissions to make a difference.
Those millions collected by the Treasury, for example, came mainly from UK power companies, and the cost will be added directly to our bills, as will the cost of annual CO2 permits in future. More worrying still, carbon trading shows no sign of achieving its purpose: CO2 emissions have increased, not slackened, since the first trading schemes. What, then, is the point? Good question, particularly for the 10,000 politicians, policy-makers and civil servants arriving this week in Poznan, Poland, for the latest round of global climate negotiations. They will consider a proposal to make carbon trading one of the world’s main tools for cutting greenhouse gas emissions after the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012.
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