The months of flatlining at the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) should be a hint to the rest of the world that carbon trading is dead. Time to take it off life support. Even at 10 cents a ton, nobody wants it. At it’s peak in July 2008, it traded for $7.50 per ton of CO2.
See who is on the CCX advisory board here
From ACM:
Token Gesture Alert as the government of New Zealand, unable to think straight thanks to years of green environmental propaganda, brings in its emissions trading scheme.
New Zealand emits about 0.1% of global CO2. So even if New Zealand reduced its emissions to zero overnight, AND it were demonstrated that the climate sensitivity is large enough to notice (which it hasn’t been), it would make not the slightest bit of difference to the climate.
Not only that, but I hardly think that China and India are going to look at New Zealand, and, wracked with guilt and remorse by the plucky little country’s valiant efforts to save the planet, stop their coal fired economies in their tracks. Not on your life. China and India are far too busy building their prosperity and lifting their populations out of poverty. It’s only wealthy countries can afford the luxury of pointless environmental gestures like this.
So the only result will be higher prices for poor Kiwis. Everything will cost more: electricity, petrol, groceries, consumer goods – everything – since everything (virtually) requires energy for its production or transportation. As the ABC reports:
New Zealanders are bracing for higher electricity and fuel prices with the introduction of an emissions trading scheme (ETS).
From today New Zealanders will pay around three cents a litre more for fuel.
Electricity bills are set to increase by up to 5 per cent as companies pass on the costs of buying carbon credits to consumers.
Environment minister Dr Nick Smith says New Zealand had to act because its greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 25 per cent over the past 20 years. [So from absolutely tiny, to slightly less absolutely tiny]
“It’s actually about New Zealand starting the path, starting the change to a less carbon intensive economy,” he said. (source)
Good luck with that. Just watch your industries move offshore, and your economy decline for no purpose whatsoever.
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This really is good news- for someone in Australia having NZ competitors who used to compete well-until now.
Isn’t it now winter time in New Zealand? I hope I don’t have to count too many dead people from freezing cold that far down under this year. It’s the sleepy Sun stupid.
Pish-posh! It won’t be to no purpose at all. It will be to environmentally unregulated countries and the result will be FAR more (and more dangerously polluting) emissions. That is to say the carbon trading scheme will, by NZ lights, increase environmental damage.
Yup. It is cold here in N.Z. Frost this morning, and, after a pleasant, sunny day, shaping up for another one tonight.
N.Z. managed to be the first country into recession last year (ahead of the stock market crash in the US), thanks to our previous Labour (mis)government.
Now they are again trying to be first lemming off the cliff with Indulgencies (sorry ETS).
Before you laugh too much, I’d better warn you that the architect of much of this (our former P.M.) now holds one of the top jobs (Economic Development), with a budget of billions, at the U.N>
No conflict of interest in the CCX Advisory Board then!
Of course we in New Zealand have been trying to convince our politicians to ignore the climate change hoax. I say “hoax” because that is the word used by the leader of the NZ opposition, John Key, in 2005. See Hansard below.
Now that John Key is the Prime Minister of NZ, he has just introduced the world’s first comprehensive EmissionsTrading Scheme today.
http://www.parliament.nz/en-NZ/PB/Debates/Debates/3/2/8/47HansD_20050510_00001115-Climate-Change-Response-Amendment-Bill-First.htm
JOHN KEY (National—Helensville) : I rise on behalf of the National Party to give the good news to the people of New Zealand—that is, the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill is a load of rubbish and the National Party will not be supporting it, for very, very good reasons indeed.
I want to start off with a broad-ranging discussion, if I may, around the Kyoto Protocol and the absolutely nonsensical road that this Government is taking New Zealand down. I know we have a Prime Minister who is very confident, and all the rest of it, but maybe she would like to step out of her office on the 9th floor and realise which planet she is on. She is on the same planet, she may be surprised to learn, as India, China—
Hon Ken Shirley: And Mugabe.
JOHN KEY: And Mugabe, yes—and a lot of other countries out there that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol. And why would they not, because they have absolutely no requirements on them, whatsoever. Yet here we are down in New Zealand, a very little country with about 0.2 percent of the world’s emissions, putting a self-imposed straitjacket on our businesses, and waving a huge flag that says: “Foreign investment, don’t come anywhere near us. Australia is over there—the West Island. Go over there to pour your dollars in.” To the Chinese we are saying: “Come in and buy as much coal as you like from our West Coast. We’ll sell it to you and you can burn it without a carbon charge—but, by the way, to those back here in Aotearoa New Zealand we will be slapping on a carbon charge and you won’t be able to operate.”
This is a complete and utter hoax, if I may say so. The impact of the Kyoto Protocol, even if one believes in global warming—and I am somewhat suspicious of it—is that we will see billions and billions of dollars poured into fixing something that we are not even sure is a problem. Even if it is a problem, it will be delayed for about 6 years. Then it will hit the world in 2096 instead of 2102, or something like that. It will not work.
Let us have a look at the Government’s response to the Kyoto Protocol. Our friends in Australia said they do not want a bar of it. They do not want to know anything about it; neither do our friends in America. I saw George W Bush, the President of the United States of America, talking about the Kyoto Protocol on CNN one night. George Bush is not necessarily known as the most eloquent speaker in US history. He is a fairly straight shooter, but he is not necessarily seen as being one of the great orators of all time. I plugged in the TV set, turned it on, and what did I see? There, on CNN, late at night, at about 11.30, was George Bush saying that America would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, because it is not good for jobs and it is not good for the American economy. I understood that. I got it. Then I saw John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, addressing the Australian people and saying the same thing—that it is not good for jobs and it is not good for the economy. So when I turned to New Zealand TV and found out that we not only would be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol but in fact would be the first country in the world—that is right—to be blazing a trail to put on a carbon tax, I was somewhat astounded.
I have a bunch of dot-com stock I’d be willing to trade for some carbon. Preferably the diamond kind of carbon.
NZ’s ETS is not receiving good press either in NZ or Australia. Most regard it as economic suicide.
“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.” -Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
via A.Word.A.Day, with Anu Garg
When you start with Carbon Credits, you essentially start a new economy, based on ….air.
Its a google translation, but you get the picture;
http://translate.google.no/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=no&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fe24.no%2Fmakro-og-politikk%2Farticle3715527.ece&sl=no&tl=en
Can carbon credits be swapped for a massage, do you think?
Richard Steckis says:
June 30, 2010 at 11:06 pm (Edit)
NZ’s ETS is not receiving good press either in NZ or Australia. Most regard it as economic suicide.
You mean they are going to fall on their sword and commit Hari Kiwi?
This one is neat demonstration of the extent to which yo can trust politicians who espouse strong convictions one year, and do a volte face the next.
Time for the people of New Zealand to blockade their parliament and conduct a ‘velvet revolution’.
I’ve been writing to MPs here in NZ but to no avail. Today, I feel quite depressed.
I’ve been reading up on the CCX a bit more. The CFI spot price is only one of a number of traded carbon instruments, and IMHO it is pretty worthless primarily because while it is a common security that CCX themselves created, its not really recognised by any of the authorities that regulate emissions trading, so its a bit of a wooden nickel. California seems to have their own instrument, which is also traded at CCX and is actually pretty highly valued, as are those registered and recognised by the northeastern states.
I’m going to investigate this stuff further, see if maybe I can figure out how to “get rich sending these guys to the poorhouse” as Eddie Murphy said in Trading Places.
I was chatting today with one of my colleagues about the economics of climate change and ETS’s and the like – he’s from China and been in Oz for a couple of years and really didn’t have an opinion one way or another about it, other than he ‘knew about CO2’
I showed him a graph of global CO2 emissions by country over the last 20 years (one of those standard ones that are easily available with a 2 minute google search – actually, the one I found was a pie chart from 2008 from the energy institute of Japan to be exact – and simply pointed out that Australia emits 1.4% of the worlds total CO2.
Its then a simple logical step, like you say about NZ, that even if the entire country of 22 million people shut down everything for 100 years, this would achieve bugger all of an effect on anything, even at the worse case dire ‘the sky is falling’ predictions. Infact, the USA could do the same thing, and that would only manage less than 20% of a reduction, which at the known rate of warming, would really mean very little in real terms (given that the effects of CO2 is not even a linear predictable thing)
And all this is without any climate science whatsoever. Add in the real known science, remove the tipping points and feedback loops that don’t seem to be match anything in the real world, and we laughed and started talking about football.
Sorry NZ, your leaders have failed you.
The effect of human emission of CO2 on global mean temperature is nil.
Here is the data from Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia for the global mean temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2010.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2010/compress:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2010/trend
This data shows a long term linear warming trend of 0.6 deg C per century.
To clearly see the oscillating pattern of global mean temperature, we remove this long term linear warming trend of 0.6 deg per century and remove the noise by calculating five-year global mean temperatures to get the following graph:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2010/compress:60/detrend:0.775/offset:0.518/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2010/trend/detrend:0.775/offset:0.518
This graph shows the following:
1) 30-years of global cooling from 1880 to 1910.
2) 30-years of global warming from 1910 to 1940.
3) 30-years of global cooling from 1940 to 1970.
4) 30-years of global warming from 1970 to 2000.
Based on the above pattern, assuming there is no shift in climate in the coming 20 years compared to the last 130 years, it is reasonable to predict:
5) 30-years of global cooling from 2000 to 2030.
Conclusion: Global mean temperature is cyclic. As a result, the effect of human emission of CO2 on global mean temperature is nil.
The introduction of the Emotions Trading Scam really pisses most Kiwi’s off. I can’t understand how Nick Smith (Minister of Climate Change Conjobs) can say we have the highest CO2 output per head of population when we generate a large part of our electricity from hydro dams.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/news-cartoons/news/article.cfm?c_id=500814&objectid=10655352
another spain I am afraid
Sorry Geoff, I have to disagree about it being good news for Australia. We have an agreement with NZ that when people move from one country to the other, they can go straight on the dole in their new country. Where will the Kiwis go when their industries fold?
My sympathy goes out to the Kiwi electorate. John Key, the Prime Minister is obviously as underhanded as the UK’s politicians. Does this mean I will have to pay more for my N.Z. lamb and butter?
Carbon credits and the trading system used to trade those credits and the financial institutions and individuals who will reap great rewards at the expense of those least able to afford to finance it all.
Who benefits?
No reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions will result and no temperature difference will be noticed, it seems on the face of it as pimped by the architects of the scheme(scam) that this is simply and exclusively a moral leadership gesture to show the lesser parts of humanity the way forward.
However this utter monstrosity is dressed up and disguised it still looks like what it is, a money making scheme to enrich a minority at the direct expense of the majority and sold as a moral crusade. The money raised will go towards buying off areas of third world governance especially vulnerable to bribery and to create the global finance/taxation base for a new global governance model.
The actual result apart from the above will be to sabotage humanity just at the very moment is our destiny when we need an industrial and technological and economic explosion on a par with the industrial revolution in the 18th-19th centuries. Just as the Luddites attempted to sabotage industrial devolopment the Luddites of the 21st century are trying to do the same thing, the difference is that the latter day Luddites have control of the political classes and scientific institutions.
The ONLY key to our survival as a global race is cheap and plentiful and reliable energy supplied to a dynamic capitalist wealth creating free trade global economy, we are at the threshhold of a truly exciting future and the only things standing in our way are fear and ignorance and selfish self interest of an ignorant minority.
Isnt this the one world goverments plan to have a level playing ground. To lower the living standards of the wealthy countrys and rise the living standards of the 3rd world countrys so then they can bring in a one world currency. you wont find a poor country paying a ETS Tax.
No worries about major industries moving off-shore, they all left years ago. All we have now is huge Aussie companies raping the economy.
All New Zealand is doing now is selling off real-estate to China – and soon at very discounted prices thanks to the crippled economy
… and yes… it is cold here at present – time for another log on the fire – and surprise surprise no Tax on that !!!
Training Film For Carbon Trading Salesmen
Beautiful country. But, apparently, too many sheep.
Will be interesting to see how long this scheme will last.