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The price of carbon permits makes them useless. Governments have issued too many permits, and also put in competing programs to reduce CO2 emissions. The collective Green Gravy train is fracturing and now even frustrated carbon traders are pointing out that parts of the save-the-world-program make no sense.
Tough to Keep the World From Warming When Carbon Is This Cheap
“Some of the renewable-energy subsidies are stupidly, insanely expensive per ton of carbon dioxide saved,” said Louis Redshaw, who has his own emissions-trading company, Redshaw Advisors Ltd. in London, and was previously head of carbon at Barclays Plc. “Politicians are not only failing to deliver a comprehensive carbon price for the economy, they are busy undermining them where they exist.”
The price of carbon is destined to achieve its true value — nothing. The only reason it hasn’t done that already is thanks to governments changing the rules to keep it alive.
Carbon trading is still a big merry-go-round even if it’s going nowhere:
Today, there are 38 countries, cities, states and provinces using pricing systems in an attempt to put a lid on greenhouse gases, according to the World Bank.
July 10th, 2016 | Tags: Carbon Market | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
Get ready. The legislation was done on the last day Parliament sat in December. The Coalition government knew it would be popular with the voters who all want “carbon action” so they… buried the news. No cheering. No speeches.
It apparently starts on July 1, and applies to 150 companies — about half our emissions. It’s a Cap N Trade system with “Caps” that can be screwed gently down as the climate warms to fill government coffers and raise electricity prices. The Direct Action plan auctions can be phased out and the SneakTax phased in. It could end up being the main game. A blank cheque.
It’s called “Safeguard” — it was safe for politicians and guards them against their failure to meet pointless, symbolic international agreements to slow storms. A Safeguard for politicians but a SneakTax for the people.
What does it mean? It’s time Australia got a new central political party.
Alan Kohler in The Australian
From July 1, coincidentally the day before the election, the Coalition’s “safeguard mechanism” within its Direct Action Plan will come into force.
One-hundred and fifty companies, representing about 50 per cent of Australia’s total carbon emissions, will be […]
A gift for Turnbull, who doesn’t deserve it.
Welcome to Election-2016 in Australia.
We’ve done this before: Bill Shorten has promised there will be “no carbon tax under Labor”. This almost exactly mirrors the promise made by Julia Gillard on her way to the most pathetic parliamentary win ever recorded in Australian history. Gillard’s barely-there-with-the-help-of-two-turncoats-success was based on this infamous deceit, which Mr Bill Shorten approved of and voted in. Channelling Gillard-2010
At least he is kinda upfront about saying there will be no tax apart from a lot of new taxes he calls trading schemes. What kind of trade are you forced by law to make? A tax…
“There will be no carbon tax under Labor, there will be no fixed price under Labor, what we are doing instead is we are working with the market to create an Emissions Trading Scheme,” Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said.
He is offering a kind of “Cap N Trade”, which is bound to suit all the Aussies who’ve been lining up at protests saying “No Carbon Tax. We want Cap N Trade”. Have you met one ? Me neither.
Let’s not forget the advantages of trading versus taxes: Markets […]
Free markets are a hot tool, but sometimes they’re “hot” like a jackhammer at a sewing bee. Who thinks it’s smart to use a free market on a ubiquitous molecule that cycles through almost all life on Earth? Answer: people who profit from it, or people don’t know what a free market is.
About 5 years ago, the VAT tax scam with carbon credits earned financial sharks around five billion Euro. The follow up to that is that, slowly, years later, in Frankfurt about 10 people have been given prison terms. (Is that all? Only ten people and 5b, or are there others in other countries?)
This type of fraud could happen in other markets too, but it surely must be easier to accomplish in fake markets where no goods are transferred. The Global Worriers narrative is that there’s risk in unleashing carbon dioxide, but they never discuss the risks of setting up fake markets, which need a lot of regulation, auditing, checking and all that — especially when every cat and dog have a stake, and the whole market might be controlled by phytoplankton.
Every fake market we set up is a feeding lot for corruption and friends-of-the-mafia. Is […]
It’s a tax that’s “not a tax” and a “free market” that isn’t free.
Joy. An emission trading scheme (ETS) is on the agenda again in Australia. Here’s why the first priority is to clean up a crooked conversation. If we can just talk straight, the stupid will sort itself out.
The national debate is a straight faced parody — it could be a script from “Yes Minister”, except no one would believe it. Bill Shorten argues that the Labor Party can control the world’s weather with something that exactly fits the definition of a tax, yet he calls it a “free market” because apparently he has no idea what a free market really is. (What union rep would?) It’s like our opposition leader is a wannabe entrepreneur building a Kmart that controls the clouds. Look out Batman, Billman is coming. When is a forced market a free market? When you want to be PM.
The vandals are at the gates of both English and economics, and we can’t even have a straight conversation. The Labor Party is in flat out denial of dictionary definitions — is that because they can’t read dictionaries, or because they don’t want an honest […]
Did you know you can change the weather by not eating deep sea fish? Me neither. But apparently fish and other marine life in the high seas contain $148 billion dollars worth of carbon dioxide. (The carbon price used, which includes mitigation costs, is apparently almost $100/tonne — a tad higher than the current EU carbon price of 5 Euro. The “price” was derived from a US govt agency, wouldn’t you know, not the free market.)
The high seas catch is worth a mere $16 billion and is only 1% of all fish caught. But it follows that either hungry people will have to pay a bit more for their fish, or fishermen will switch to take more fish from the low seas. Either that, or hungry people can just eat more rice, right? And it’s not like anyone cares about the protein content of poor people’s diets is it? (Look who made a hyperbolic fuss about a potential 5% reduction in the mineral content of rice by 2050.)
Lets think for a minute about how anyone would make a global oceanic ban work? Since people only catch deep sea fish for fun, I suppose we just ask them to […]
Another day is The Backdown? Everything is more important than carbon action these days. In China, real pollution is trumping the fake kind. China has been toying with carbon markets, but this month announced they might have to back away. (The shame!)
[Reuters] “…the all-out efforts to combat China’s disastrous pollution levels might get in the way of plans to tax carbon dioxide emissions in a bid to stunt the rapid growth of greenhouse gas emissions, Zhu Guangyao, the vice environment minister, said.
“We have to reflect the requests of the majority through many consultation rounds,” he told the Beijing Morning Post from the sidelines of China’s annual parliamentary sessions.
A carbon tax is increasingly controversial among lawmakers, said Zhu, adding that an environment tax would be easier to push through without carbon in the mix.
Zhu also referred to the fact that Australia, under a new conservative government, is trying to abolish its carbon tax, while a price on carbon has been blocked in the United States.”
China’s carbon markets were never serious anyway — the glorious plan was to launch seven pilot trading schemes — and each new market was an excuse for environmental activists to issue press […]
Global Carbon Markets peaked in 2011 at €96bn euro. Over the next two years they plummeted to €36bn* euro collapsing by 60%. Though the press didn’t seem in a hurry to convey that, and if I search, no government funded agency has done a graph like this below (perhaps I missed it?)
The decline was looking pretty terminal, but the EU government has now voted to backload (which means hold off the permits and cut the supply). This is a desperate measure involving over half the new permits to keep the “free” market alive.
Instead, the news agencies with greener leanings have underplayed the fall, and the 60% decline is now invisibly massaged in places like BusinessGreen into a “market set to soar”. This is not just media-spin but a news-through-a-centrifuge.
The value of the world’s carbon markets is set to soar to €64bn (£53bn) this year, up from €39bn in 2013, as the European Union launches a temporary fix to revive its ailing emissions trading system.
Peak carbon came and went. Those 2014 figures are speculation. Otherwise the trend was terminal.
A breathless journalist at Thompson Reuters describes the possible revival of the market back to 30% below […]
It’s just another day tracking the decline of the global warming meme.
Things were so pear-shaped for global carbon trading markets in 2012 that the World Bank canceled its annual State of the Carbon Market report. But how bad were they? In their last report in 2012 the grand global total was $176b USD for the 2011 year. Since the World Bank figure are not publishing their tally any more, I’ve switched to the Reuters Point Carbon figures instead, which are issued in Euro.
Rather devastatingly, despite the fact the FTSE grew 6% in 2012 and Euro Stoxx grew by 13% in 2012, the global carbon market (which is mostly an EU market) fell by a whopping 36% in 2012. Money printing is running rife and new money is pouring into asset markets worldwide, yet globally the money is running from invisible, rortable, pointless carbon certificates. We are past the peak, and over the hill. This parrot is almost dead.
Back in the heady days of 2008 the growth was described as “explosive” and it was predicted it would grow to $1.2 trillion by 2020 (about 880 billion €) .
…
These figures are different to previous USD ones, […]
Credit to The Australian for printing both points of view. Published as an Op-Ed today.
Carbon credits market is neither free nor worth anything by: Joanne Nova From: The Australian July 31, 2013 12:00AM
THE paradox du jour: people who like free markets don’t want a carbon market, and the people who don’t trust capitalism want emissions trading. So why are socialists fighting for a carbon market? Because this “market” is a bureaucrat’s wet dream.
A free market is the voluntary exchange of goods and services. “Free” means being free to choose to buy or to not buy the product. At the end of a free trade, both parties have something they prefer.
[Those who know what real free markets are know that an emissions trading scheme is not and never can be a free market. The “Carbon-Market” is a market with no commodity, no demand, and no supply. Who needs a “carbon credit”? The government entirely determines both supply and demand.]
A carbon market is a forced market. There is little intrinsic incentive to buy a certificate for a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. It says a lot about the voluntary value of a […]
…
Not so long back, Deutsche Bank were writing 50 page reports on the science of climate change. They paid for giant 70 foot high towers of doom counting carbon emissions near Madison Square Gardens. They were so concerned about the planet they had a division called Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors (DBCCA). They weren’t driven by money, of course, only by the science.
“…we at Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors (DBCCA) have always said that the science is one essential foundation of the whole climate change investment thesis.”
But the science must have changed for DB because now they don’t even turn up:
Banks, investors desert key carbon market event
BARCELONA, June 1 – Governments and voluntary offset sellers took centre stage at a major carbon market conference in Barcelona this week after banks and investors – previously amongst the biggest exhibitors at the annual event – skipped it, in part due to rock-bottom CO2 prices.
The annual Carbon Expo trade fair is seen by many as a barometer for investment and general sentiment in the global carbon markets, many of which are plagued with regulatory uncertainty and withering demand.
June 21st, 2013 | Tags: Carbon Market, CDM, Deutsche Bank | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | |
When is a free market not free? When it doesn’t do what the bureaucrats wanted it to “freely do”. There is a message from this-pale-shadow-of-a-global-carbon-free-market and it’s telling us that carbon (dioxide) should be free, as in $0, no cost, no fee, no tax.
CDM’s (Clean Development Mechanisms) were set up in 1997 with Kyoto. It is separate from the EU market, and is one of the only “global” carbon markets.
Global carbon trading system has ‘essentially collapsed’
The UN clean development mechanism, designed to give poor countries access to green technologies, is in dire need of rescue
Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent
The world’s only global system of carbon trading, designed to give poor countries access to new green technologies, has “essentially collapsed”, jeopardising future flows of finance to the developing world.
Billions of dollars have been raised in the past seven years through the United Nations‘ system to set up greenhouse gas-cutting projects, such as windfarms and solar panels, in poor nations. But the failure of governments to provide firm guarantees to continue with the system beyond this year has raised serious concerns over whether it can survive.
9.4 out […]
The collapse of the Man-Made Myth continues apace. You may not read headlines as such (at least not in major dailies) but all the signs are there.
People who we never would have imagined speaking against the Big Scare Campaign are now doing so. Key glaciers are not melting and corals are happy. Governments won’t tell you it’s over, but they are behaving that way (the Australian one excepted, due to an election fluke that gave the Greens the balance of power). The Catholic Herald headlined it: Is the ‘anthropogenic global warming’ consensus on the point of collapse?
Source Barchart.
The last year of carbon trading in EUR's continues to fall. (Click to enlarge).
Mini update: The carbon market is being referred to as “dead”. Johannes Teyssen, chief executive of Germany’s EON, urged policymakers to make fixes. “Let’s talk real: the ETS is bust, it’s dead,” Mr Teyssen said in Brussels this week, adding: “I don’t know a single person in the world that would invest a dime based on ETS signals.” [full story: Financial Times]. Point Carbon analysts have downgraded the forecast price of carbon credits for the second time in two months as the carbon […]
Gillard once lauded the genius of the carbon market. That part of the “free” market which is free to move, is moving — and right out. The smart money is saying that carbon trading is a dead dog. It’s a has-been-tulip, a sick puppy, a sinking ship.
The future of global carbon trading is so “certain” that Barclays Bank is not even bothering to leave one part time guy in the US office with a post box, so they can pretend they still have an interest in it. The mood has so changed, they see an advantage in letting the world know they’re not wasting a single cent more on carbon trading in the United States of America. Well that made my day. :-).
“That is not good news for carbon-dioxide trading, especially not in the US,”
Barclays was the first UK bank to set up a carbon trading desk, and fast to move into carbon trading: “Barclays Capital is the most active player in the emissions trading market, having traded some 300 million tonnes as at February 2007″.
Barclays Closes US Carbon Desk In Latest Cap And Trade Setback
8.9 out of 10 based on 94 […]
I can hardly let the demise of the Chicago Climate Exchange go by without a note.
Didn’t I point out that if carbon trading was a free market, nobody would pay a cent?
Well, hail the triumph of the free market.
(Yes, a couple of weeks back, when the news came out that the CCX was closing, it did make my day.)
But as Steven Milloy points out the death of the US national carbon market has barely made a mention in the news.
How did the Green press react? Denial:
“[There are] no implications for the EU and UK,” Emilie Mazzacurati, head of carbon research for North America at Point Carbon, told BusinessGreen in an email.
No implications? None? And would they have said that if new markets had blossomed in, say, Japan or Brazil?
The market opened in Nov 2000, and as Milloy notes, with a red carpet future:
The CCX was the brainchild of Northwestern University business professor Richard Sandor, who used $1.1 million in grants from the Chicago-based left-wing Joyce Foundation to launch the CCX. For his efforts, Time named […]
Good news… In news just in, there’s another important sign that the momentum is shifting as Money goes in search of better prospects.
ICE cuts 50% of staff at Chicago Climate Exchange
The 1st round of layoffs began July 23, with more to come. U.S. climate inaction is being blamed as main reason for cuts. Things are so bad, that ICE is collecting feedback on what to do with climate bourse
ICE just came in one day and started hacking away … We were told the company was restructuring,” said one source, who declined to be named.
Another said ICE cut around 20 roles at the CCX late last month, and at least another six high-level layoffs would come before next spring.
7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]
Carbon prices have plummeted in the US.
(So they are that much closer to their true value…)
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative sold 40.7 million permits for $1.88 each, 19 cents lower than the last auction held in March and 2 cents above the minimum allowable bid, the cap-and-trade program said on its website today. Each permit in the carbon trading program for power plants from Maryland to Maine represents one ton of carbon dioxide.
Why are prices so low? On the one hand, people have doubts about Congress creating a national market for them. Fair enough. But on the other hand, “Tim Cheung, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance said: “Demand for power hasn’t increased with the economic recovery…”
Since people aren’t buying as much electricity there are spare “permits to pollute” all over the place. But it begs the question of what kind of economic recovery it is, if it doesn’t need … power?
Can I sell you some air over China?
Meanwhile some NGOs are waking up to the scammability of permits for invisible unverifiable goods. CDMWatch was set up by a group of NGO’s and has found the firms that sell the […]
What a surprise: The free-market-that-is-not-free leaps from one scandal to the next. In a real free market where salesmen sell something real, and buyers buy something they want, people can’t get away with cheating, or not for long.
If someone sold you a bulk carrier of coal, and it turned up empty, you’d notice.
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]
For the last five years the carbon market has been doubling year after year. But in 2009, the exponential growth trajectory paused. Point Carbon issued a report this week estimating that the world wide market in carbon trading in 2009 totalled around $136 billion dollars, which is not much higher than the 2008 figure. After years of living in a rapacious bubble, prices are about 60% below the peaks of 2008, carbon traders are starting to peel out into other commodities, and the sails are looking decidedly flat on the Maxi Yacht known as Carbon-Credits Inc.
The size of the market in gigatons of carbon grew nearly 70% over 2008, but the falling prices meant the same amount of money churned through the system and the total dollars were very similar year on year.
How times have changed. Back in May 2009, emissions traders were feeling confident that a US market for emissions would be approved. Not surprisingly, the low carbon prices and the non-event of Copenhagen mean that carbon traders are becoming frustrated. Some are even expanding into… markets that are based on real commodities like oil, gas, gold and steel. [Reuters]
10 out […]
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