Gore’s grand experiment has flatlined.
As we reported almost two weeks ago, the Gore and Pachauri advised Chicago Carbon Exchange (CCX) has closed. Closing price? A nickel per ton of CO2.
Here’s the final day closing page for posterity:
A 16 lb bag of charcoal briquettes is worth more than a ton of CO2. About 220x more.
Here’s more on the story:
Carbon Trade Ends on Quiet Death of Chicago Climate Exchange
Republican mid-term election joy deals financial uncertainty among green investors as the Chicago Climate Exchange announces the end of U.S. carbon trading.
The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on October 21, 2010 that it will cease carbon trading this year. However, Steve Milloy reporting on Pajamasmedia.com (November 6, 2010) finds this huge story strangely unreported by the mainstream media.
To some key analysts the collapse of the CCX appears to show that international carbon trading is “dying a quiet death.” Yet Milloy finds that such a major business failure has drawn no interest at all from the mainstream media. Milloy noted that a “Nexis search conducted a week after CCX’s announcement revealed no news articles published about its demise.”
Not until November 02, 2010 had the story even been picked up briefly and that was by Chicagobusiness.com (Crain’s). Reporter, Paul Merrion appeared to find some comfort that while CCX will cease all trading of new emission allowances at the end of the year, “it will continue trading carbon offsets generated by projects that consume greenhouse gases, such as planting trees.”
Collapse is Personal Setback for U.S. President
Barack Obama was a board member of the Joyce Foundation that funded the fledgling CCX. Professor Richard Sandor, of Northwestern University had started the business with $1.1 million in grants from the Chicago-based left-wing Joyce Foundation enthusiastically endorsed by Obama. When founded in November 2000, CCX’s carbon trading market was predicted to grow anywhere between $500 billion and $10 trillion. Fortunately before its collapse Sandor was able to net $98.5 million for his 16.5% stake when CCX was sold.
Failure of European Climate Market May Follow
Milloy writes, “although the trading in carbon emissions credits was voluntary, the CCX was intended to be the hub of the mandatory carbon trading established by a cap-and-trade law. Trading carbon was, “the only purpose for which it was founded.” But with their resurgence after the mid-terms the Republicans have now put a new cohort of global warming skeptics into the corridors of power.
Unlike the American voluntary scheme, the European cousin of the CCX, the European Climate Exchange (ECX), continues to trade due to the mandatory carbon caps of the Kyoto Protocol. But the future of the ECX will be in doubt unless a new climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol is introduced. That treaty expires in 2012. But the ineffectual Copenhagen Climate Conference (2009) exposed an inability among international politicians to agree on climate change. If this stalement persists then the European ECX may likely suffer the same fate as Chicago’s CCX.
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weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee plop
We will be needing a carbon exchange in California. Correction: Kooky Kalifornia.
California Cap and Trade is alive and well as part of AB 32, which survived a challenge at the ballot box on November 2. Trading carbon instruments is a key to the program.
Amazing how such a scam could persist for seven plus years and nobody got arrested. In fact, Professor Sandor appears to have made a bundle of money. Bernie Madoff should have taken lessons from these guys.
May Europe follow and soon.
Didn’t Gore & Co get $600m for this dead donkey earlier in the year from ICE, the sane crowd that run the European equivalent?
If a carbon exchange falls and no one in the MSM is around to hear it, did it make a sound?
I’t’s better than we thought – isn’t it?
Now….who’s gonna protect me from bad kids?!!!!!
ICE buys up Climate Exchange for US$604M
May 01, 2010
http://www.livetradingnews.com/ice-buys-up-climate-exchange-for-us604m-12800.htm
From US$604m to $0 in six months.
A classic financial pump & dump scheme. Carbon trading is the largest fraud ever perpututated on mankind. Obumma.
Dang !!
There goes my plan to organize the homeless and sell their carbon credits.
I am surprised that certain news organizations are not using this to show just how bad big oil is to have killed carbon trading. I suppose the real problem is that the Earth is the biggest trader of all, but it won’t pony up the cash.
Mark up one more bad idea that died a miserable death. Looking back, I think every idea Al Gore ever had ended the same way. Hmmm.. Lets start a market for bad ideas from Al Gore. We can raffle the death date of his ideas. 😀
John Kehr
R.I.P
It’s had the red shirt on for a while…
Yes, but the suicidal Low Carbon Fuel Standards (LCFS) policy in California will contribute to the demise of the State Economy and require fuel import from “states” less friendly than Canada as the supply from alternative sources fail to meet unrealistic expectations.
The Chinese are already moving in to take up the slack and use the oil from Canada oil sands..
http://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/Article/2701411/LCFS-will-adversely-affect-oil-sands-crude-refiners.html?LS=EMS455705
“Purvin & Gertz, Inc., has released a report on the effect low-carbon-fuel standards (LCFS) will have on oil sands. The report notes that LCFS programs are being implemented in California, Oregon and British Columbia. They are under consideration in many other states and provinces and are becoming regional in nature. LCFS programs differ by jurisdiction, but have in common mandated reductions in the carbon intensity of transportation fuels. By targeting petroleum-derived gasoline and diesel and promoting low-carbon alternative energy forms such as electricity, hydrogen, natural gas and next generation biofuels, LCFS programs are intended to reduce overall greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on a “well-to-wheels” basis.”
Strange, I can hear a song by ABBA around here when reading this. Greed does actually work, to a limit. Here in Sweden we don’t have a trading exchange for carbon emissions but we have had a tax on these emissions for some twenty odd years and it doesn’t work at all. We have more emissions today and more money keeps flowing in for our greedy state.
And the ABBA song? Money, money, money…
/Carl
Stock prices have always been tenuous entities, reflecting investors’ hopes and fears as much as substantive activities. This CCX demise confirms the utter hopelessness of the concept.
Star Trek – the cultural gift that keeps on giving? Maybe we could add an Away Team crewman (wearing a red shirt) with a name tag labeled “IPCC”? Heh.
Great!
But I have a sinking feeling they’ll be back…
And for those who placed their bets (and your tax dollars) on Algae as the replacement liquid alternative fuel:
http://biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2010/11/05/algal-fuels-just-around-the-corner-or-10-years-away/
Algal Fuels: Just around the Corner or 10 years away?
“ShareAlgae being cultivated in a small-scale micropond at Sapphire Energy headquarters in La Jolla, California
In California, a new report from the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) in Berkeley projects that development of cost-competitive algae biofuel production will require much more longterm research, development and demonstration.”
“It is clear,” the EBI scientists conclude, “that algal oil production will be neither quick nor plentiful – 10 years is a reasonable projection for the R, D & D (research, development and demonstration) to allow a conclusion about the ability to achieve, at least for specific locations, relatively low-cost algal biomass and oil production.”
“The report can be downloaded from the Digest’s Biofuels Information Zone, here.”
Authors include Nigel Quinn and Tryg Lundquist of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Ian Woertz of Cal Poly, and John Benemann. Benemann recently made the Digest’s Top 100 People in Bioenergy list.
“Even with relatively favorable and forward-looking process assumptions (from cultivation to harvesting to processing), algae oil production with microalgae cultures will be expensive and, at least in the near-to-mid-term, will require additional income streams to be economically viable,” the authors noted in a release highlighting their findings.”
“The “10-years away” theme: a gathering of outlooks”
“There are a wider assortment of algal fuel commercialization timelines than crayons in a big Crayola box, but there are a couple of studies that have come out from academia of late that focus on the 10 year horizon. Phil Pienkos, Al Darzins and Eric Jarvis at NREL recently wrote in IEEE Spectrum: “our projections suggest that in the next 10 years or so algal biofuels will be able to compete economically with crude oil costing between $75 and $100 per barrel.”
“That’s also the horizon we see in the work at Sapphire Energy, which is constructing a 1-million gallon demonstration scale facility by 2014, and expects to be at commercial scale production with a 100 million gallons facility by 2018 and at 10 such facilities by 2025. ExxonMobil and Synthetic Genomics, in their communications, emphasize the long-term nature of their R&D work on cyanobacteria-based fuels.”
Key finding: demonstration-scale plants are “premature”
“Overall, this report from EBI is the most comprehensive survey to date that we’ve seen on the economics, and technical challenges for algal fuels.”
“So it is worth taking a long look at the authors’ conclusion that “the building of 100-hectare demonstration plants, with investments of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, are premature.”
It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.
The EU has plans to blackmail the world into carbon trading.
Every foreign airline with slots on European Airports will have to compensate it’s carbon emissions from 2012.
I really hope the entire scheme goes down the drain but the EU apparatchniks are determined and operate without any democratic control.
No one is reporting on this. I can’t even find it in business periodicals. This is a huge setback for government and Goldman Sachs.
Both sides of the US media intentionally misunderstand the whole Carbon Cult, to serve their own purposes. The Left side (90%) sees the Cult as Good Government Protecting Holy Planet from Evil Humans. The Right side (10% of media) sees the Cult as Evil Government Ramming Big Taxes Down Our Throats.
Neither of these government-centered views is correct. The Carbon Cult, at least for the last decade, has been just one more Wall Street bubble, with the potential for vast theft.
Now that the bubble has turned out to be a money-loser for most of its participants (including the owners of both Right and Left media conglomerates) it will finally begin to fade.
Just goes to show, the markets NEVER lie.
They’ll probably want to be trading biodiversity credits next.