We knew this was coming. Carbon Financial Instruments are now trading for 10 cents per metric tonne on the Chicago Climate Exchange. I wonder if the investors are reacting to the Hockey Stick Implosion news? As reported on WUWT, less than one month ago it was 25 cents a tonne, and a year ago it was over 1 dollar. The all time high was May 2008 at over 7 dollars a tonne. Today: poof.
Looks like there was a big sell-off today. Carbon Investor confidence must be “unprecedented”.
The chart is only a sliver from rock bottom:
Anyone who was a founding member at 1 dollar has now lost 90% of their investment.
Tough noogies for them.
In other news, Zimbabwe dollars are still selling for higher value than CCX CFI’s on Ebay.
I wonder if this fellow might have to drop his price for the domain name? Maybe he’d take a barter deal for some CCX instruments?
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Its worse than we thought hahaha
Anthony,
While I agree that the Voluntary Emission Reduction (VER) market is quite problematic for a lot of reasons (dubious additionality, few reporting or auditing standards, etc.), you should realize that the CCX is a particular subset of the VER market and does not necessarily reflect the prevailing price of most carbon offsets. Long-standing market participants like Native Energy, for example, sell VERs for around $14 a ton, roughly the same price as a few years ago. The annual State of the Voluntary Carbon Market report is one of the few good sources of data on the overall market: http://ecosystemmarketplace.com/documents/cms_documents/StateOfTheVoluntaryCarbonMarkets_2009.pdf
The CCX expanded dramatically in volume this year, and the current price collapse may be due largely to that particular part of the market being flooded. To wit: the CCX expanded from about 15% to close to 50% of the volume of the voluntary carbon market between 2008 and 2009 (with total volume nearly doubling from $350 million to $700 million).
REPLY: Zeke no matter how you slice it or sell it, in my opinion and the opinion of many others, it’s still pointless speculation on untangible vaporware. – Anthony
I have always said that carbon credit trading was the buying and selling of nothing… finally the price is reflecting this…. ahhh Tulip bulbs!!!
Can we short-sell them? If so, we can gain money as they fall!
Ecotretas
Can I buy carbon credits and then sell them on the street for $5 a ton(ne). Here in Oregon I could sell them to motorist while they are having their gas pumped.
Anybody who was founding member (and presumably had any market experience) would have sold off when it was $7/tonne. The only people who bought it $7 were marks, the same ones who ENRON just before the big fall, and tech stocks in early 2000.
The founding members are people like Al Gore. They sold to the marks who watched AIT and bought the meme.
Dark times for phony baloney Mr. Carbon Credit Al Gore and his GS ceo’s
Hi,
I’m new here and also pretty new on the “subject” messing around with numbers in favor of climate change and the big sceme and crime wich is unfolding right now…
I started wondering after hearing the news about our national weather institute the KNMI in the Netherlands, and their scam of putting in wrong data in temperature scores. I saw u posted this stuff on this amazing website and got interested since then.
This carbon taxing wich is gonna be presented as the solution to the problem, (Problem, reaction, solution is what it sounds like..) will be accepted by the hypnotised televisionised human beings in numbers of as much as 90% or even larger.. They just follow the rest like they are suppost to..
The only thing we can do is try to wake people up before it’s too late. This website makes a strong efford for that goal, on wich i want to make a compliment about.
Belvedere
The Money and Connections Behind Al Gore’s Carbon Crusade
Deborah Corey Barnes
10/03/2007
Along with Gore, the co-founder of GIM is Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson.
Last September, Goldman Sachs bought 10% of CCX shares for $23 million. CCX owns half the ECX, so Goldman Sachs has a stake there as well.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=22663
In market terms, the product must become de listed. Empty cans and pop bottles have more value. Follow the money. I suspect Soros sold high and bought low. He does the same with foreign currencies. It has gotten him felony convictions in France and Hungary. Convicted felon Soros owns Climate progress and it is run by Joe Romm. Joes supervisor is leading the cahrge as a member on ACORN board. Another fraudulent enterprise.
A side note. Look at the board of CCX. it includes Mayor Daley if I remember correctly and some scientists that have no tangible market tools and skills.
http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/content.jsf?id=67
As I wrote in my Carbon Credit Article back in 2008:
Meanwhile, back at the financial dealing desks for Carbon Credits, another commodity is about to crash. But perhaps I should not use the term ‘commodity’, for Carbon Credits (CCs) are an abstract construct that have even less contact with the real world than our over-inflated monetary systems. If there was ever an emperor with no clothes, it is a carbon trader declaring that a CC is worth £30 or £20 or £10, or any other figure that he or she may invent. CCs are a new pyramid selling scheme, that only survives as long as someone is promoting it and as long as there are more gullible customers pilling into this new market. But there are not. A small element of science is beginning to doubt the Global Warming trends, fraud has destabilised the Carbon Trading market, and a global recession will flood this already unsteady market with millions of unwanted CCs. The price of a CC is about to fall through the floor, and I expect that the whole concept of a Carbon Trading market will fall over the cliff with it.
It was all too easy to see – even before the present financial crash.
.
Happily this is one investment disaster I managed to dodge. 🙂
In the words of Seinfeld,
“Aw, that’s a shame…”
At this price I can offset all the carbon I am likely to produce for the rest of my life for only £200 quid or so. I’ll bet that the government will not take that into account when they tax me untill my pips squeek. There is no mechanism for avoiding tax by purchasing carbon offsets in this way.
Liquid CO2 goes for around $25 per ton. (Probably varies with volume).
Notice the volume in September? Many days near or at zero. There is a spike in volume at the very end (as the price plummets more) which is likely someone dumping whatever they have at a big loss to folks who want wall paper.
The basic problem here is that in order to get Cap and Tirade passed the Obama Admin promised enough free quatloos to big players to buy their silence that there is no longer anyone who needs to buy these things. Ergo zero value. Like all fiat money, the issuer issues a heck of a lot of them until the point where the “value” hits nothing (or near enough for all practical purposes).
You see the same thing in stocks of bankrupt companies. They will trade long after the bankruptcy is announced for a few cents per share. Who buys them? Well, I once bought 100,000 shares of a bankrupt company for a small cost just to look at my stock account showing that I owned 100,000 shares of something. Yes, it “evaporated” in about 5 months… but I got more than my $100 worth out of looking at those statements! Heck, I almost managed to convince myself there was something real behind it…
Quatloos, Quatloos! Get Your Quatloos here! Can’t place a carbon bet without your Quatloos!…
(Frankly, I’m tempted to buy 1000 tons of carbon credits for $100 just to be able to tell radical green folks to go stuff it since I’ll never use 1000 tons of carbon fuels before I die… but I’ve already played that fantasy game with the other $100 toy… so maybe I’ll just fill the tank and go to StarBucks and a Movie instead 😉
You sure that’s not a chart of GM’s stock price?
Let me guess what comes next.
Does anyone actually expect that someone can remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere for 10 cents? If you purchase a service (any service) at 1/100th of what that service ought to cost, and you never actually see that service performed, do you honestly expect that it will happen? Anybody that buys this junk lives in Fantasyland.
My guess it that most of the fools who invested in such an instrument are die-hard ecofundamentalists. Good to see them getting it right in the cojones!
Doug,
The CCX is almost exclusively limited to corporations buying and selling voluntary emission reductions. Prices of so-called “Over The Counter” (or OTC) carbon offsets that folks who watched Gore’s movie would be tempted to buy have remained relatively constant.
Anthony,
We may well disagree over how big a societal problem CO2 emissions are. However, assuming for a moment that CO2 mitigation is desirable, well-designed markets for carbon would surely be preferable to command-and-control emission standards (e.g. the recent EPA announcement). Discussing problems in the voluntary market from an economics perspective is interesting in its own right, independent of any climate science questions, and I’m pretty sure that recent CCX price changes are due to economic factors.
Specifically, voluntary credits are largely worthless if the U.S. establishes a compliance market for carbon reductions, so long-term VER prices for companies are strongly impacted by the relative perceived probability of binding carbon markets being established in the next few years.
I wrote an article a year or so ago on the various shortcomings of voluntary carbon markets in the U.S.: http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2008/09/the-us-voluntary-carbon-offset-market/ Unfortunately, few of these issues have been resolved in the interim, and the absence of serious standards for offset additionality in the currently proposed climate bills open the door to a whole host of future problems.
My financial blog Zero Hedge is going to love this story.
So, will the British-Columbia Liberal Government reduce the carbon tax? Or even better, abolish it?
One can only Dream with yahoos as politicians!
Hmmm… Just as the big push for “climate reform” is happening in the U.S. congress CCX price falls off the cliff.
Maybe someone is instigating the fall in order to snap up cheap Carbon Financial Instruments before Crap (sic) and Trade passes?
Or maybe it has something to do with that pesky Canadian skunk at the CO2 garden party.
Will someone please explain to me why he is spending 3.4 billion dollars of my money on carbon capture and storage (CCS)?
Rockefeller has consistently pushed to make CCS technologies part of the solution in making the United States more energy independent. He fought to make sure funding for CCS technologies was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – and as a result, $3.4 billion was secured for low carbon coal and carbon sequestration projects.
As discussions surrounding climate legislation move forward in the Senate, Rockefeller is fighting for even stronger investments in the technologies needed to secure a confident future for West Virginia coal.
http://rockefeller.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=318456
The problem with buying or selling air is there is lots of it … Hard to corner and manipulate the market.
When do the lawsuits start? Someone self important has made a killing off of selling others on the scam.