Once upon a time, carbon trading was supposed to be the salvation for Earth’s climate problems. But as time went on, people started realizing that something was wrong. As usual, financial markets anticipated the move. Late last year, US carbon trading crashed. Two weeks later, it closed.
In Europe, the price of CO2 emissions even flourished earlier this year. The European Union pushed for stronger policies towards renewables. And Fukushima pressed German’s chancellor Angela Merkel to abandon nuclear, with some imagining that renewables would fill in the gap.
Last week, Greece started auctioning their EUAs (European Union Allowances). They need the money, and probably other countries will follow, including Portugal. But they were not that lucky! Of the 1 million permits, only 6000 EUA were sold. The reason: nobody is buying…
In the meantime, Poland has blocked an EU deal on CO2 emissions. They are the largest producer of hard coal in the EU, and the share of coal in electricity generation (92% in 2004) is the highest among the EU Member States. They are also pushing for shale gas. The result for them: the biggest GDP growth in 2009 and the third in 2010, amongst the 27 European member states.
Finally, Yvo de Boer has confirmed what everyone knows: the Kyoto Protocol is dead!
The result: This week, Bluenext‘s EUA phase 2 2008-2012, went tumbling down. It closed at 12.21 €, down from 15.41 € a week before, a 20% drop in a week! And after all, carbon markets are not actually helping to combat global warming and climate change, and are open to the kind of speculation and fraud that led to the global financial crisis of 2008…
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It fascinates me that the news items that come up here (WUWT and others) seem to be on a different planet to the items on the MSM. I regularly watch BBC and CNN and have come to realise that they are highly selective in particular areas. They don’t screen out news that it negative about themselves, but news like this never sees the light of day. It seems more important for them to protect this scam than it does to protect their own image. It is so unfortunate that so many people have no idea that such news exists.
From what I’ve seen in the news recently , it seems that the EU may be in a financial ” death spiral “. I wonder how much their climate policies contributed to this . How long will it be before the so-called progressives in the US realize that the ” European model ” is a failure ?
You don’t mean to say people are not putting their money where the green mouth is?
You mean the latte greens might have to drink black coffee?
That their hobby horse has run out of motorised wheels and that they have to use a stick between their legs. Ugh! No!,
Sweat like other people? No way.
LOL!
CC’s are fiat currencies of the worst kind, because the total amount to be “printed” is always governed by some sort of compromise. Also, they aren’t fully convertible.
No wonder when the moment of truth comes, it’s looks pretty much like graphs of Soviet bloc currencies in early nineties.
The Carbon trading rot is like the back alley of a fish store, the garbage bins are full of rotten stinking fish parts and body’s they couldn’t sell or even give away. This is the state and future for all carbon tradings or CO2 taxes. It never passed the bad deal, stink test.
On top of an potential collapse of of the western worlds financial system the future for all of us is looking very bad, especially the green dreams of endless tax and grant money is starting to look very bleak.
We are running out of real money!
Carbon credits not selling? They better have a lot of bourbon credits saved up – they’re gonna need ’em.
Hey – they can make bourbon dioxide: one atom of bourbon, two atoms of oxy-gin (they can substitute shots for atoms). Their bourbon footprints may be a tad unsteady after a few of those however.
Yasou!
They should cut their losses, and convert the shares to something useful & practical, like tissue paper or kindling. Used as directed, it will recycle just fine ending up as fertilizer for some starving plant.
The predictable result will be that politicians as well as journalists will blame the inevitable failure of the impending climate talks and negotiations squarely on the markets, not on the usual collapse of all such trading bubbles eventually bursting (from Tulipomania (1630s) and the South Sea Bubble (1720s) to the crises of 1998 and 2008), The fact that most people in Europe are not even aware that carbon trading has been installed for some time “to combat AGW” will not help in the matter.
While these carbon credit trading schemes are failing all over the place, California’s Carbon Credit trading scheme is just getting started. Certainly the state will see the light and forget about their CC trading scheme before too long, won’t they? Nah.
Interesting point by Ulrich. “The fact that most people are not even aware….”
I hadn’t thought of that. Really successful bubbles require LARGE numbers of easily fooled ordinary people to sustain the pyramid. South Sea, stocks in the ’20s and ’80s and ’90s, housing in the 2000’s … all supported by ordinary people who thought they were getting into the Big Time.
The Carbon Bubble has always been limited to the cognoscenti. It’s done an amazingly good job of spreading scientific ignorance among the cognoscenti, but it has failed to fool them on a raw economic level. Insiders know when the deal’s gone flat.
All scams eventually are found out and die the death.. AGW/Climate Change/CAGW, camel shooting in the Aussie desert, C02 sequestration, carbon credits in the US (Chicago Climate Exchange) and now the EU equivalent is also crashing and will be dead soon. Good riddance.
What do our politicians need to see all this and wake up from their state of drunken stupor?The Czech and Polish politicians seem to be realising this. Whose next?
Yep, nobody I know realises that there is a carbon tax / trading market / charge in the EU – yet.
Once they do…
Maybe we should pay for carbon credits with bitcoins.
;->
For too long the UN and EU have conspired to try and force the world’s nations to comply with their idiotic schemes of carbon taxes which were purely driven by political agendas focused on wealth transfer and never had anything to do with climate change reality. Yesterday China called off an expected announcement at the Paris Air Show for a $3.8 billion euro deal for the A380 airbus in protest over the EU’s plans to impose carbon taxes on all airlines flying in Europe starting next year. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has called this EU threat illegal and many countries have challenged this ridiculous EU scheme and threatened to take economic counter measures to punish the EU airlines if it does not back down.
EU airlines are now starting to buckle under the pressure and asking the EU ETS to reconsider their entire approach to this issue for fear of having these massive tax provisions undercut their global competitiveness.
Its high time that the entire concept of global carbon taxes be thrown out and acknowledged as being one of the most fraudulently devised schemes ever conceived by deceitful and dishonest climate fear alarmist scientists.
Please don’t make a habit of using graphs that don’t have zero at the origin. 20% drop is big, but it looked like 100% ( I think oil dropped about 20% recently as well). Leave the massaged graphs to the warmists.
J
Another job for Booker and/or Delingpole – spread the word, lads….
P Walker,
I can tell you that the ‘financial ” death spiral “’ was a reality in Portugal. Please check it out at:
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2011/04/dark-economy-inside-perspective.html
Fortunately, the IMF bailout we’re experiencing has several conditions, involving alternative energy rationalization measures that have to be met…
Ecotretas
BargHumer says:
June 25, 2011 at 12:31 pm
“I regularly watch BBC and CNN and have come to realise that they are highly selective in particular areas. They don’t screen out news that it negative about themselves, but news like this never sees the light of day. ”
I disagree. The Daily Mail has things to say about the BBC that the BBC doesn’t report; the ridiculous perks they pay for staff moving to the North. Similar with German public TV; they get paid by an enforced license and would never report about the bureaucratic colossus (5,000 busybodies AFAIK) associated with that.
Over at numberwatch.co.uk, John Brignell has been forecasting the greenflationary-inspired death spiral of the EU’s carbon obsession for at least 10 years now.
The EU’s carbonostra must have known the day of reckoning was coming but the problem they have now is that Europe’s leaders are dealing with a real problem and don’t have time (or money) to deal with a pretend one.
One can only hope that last week’s concerted action to drive down the price of oil is a long overdue dawning of reality for those in power that the demonisation can’t continue any more.
Just as Gillard and her goons takes Australia ever closer to the edge the rest of the world is pulling back. It is heartening to see that some grown ups are starting to take control again. The experiment with the warm and fuzzies has failed spectacularly. All we need now is for Angela Merkel to be displaced and Europe will return to the real world.
Much as it hurt many people, the Global Financial Crisis may have saved the world from the ecoloons. It will take them a while to finally die but they are in the throes.
European utilities can always buy UN CDM credits which are “produced” in a cheaper way… basically by inventing them. One example from India, where forests generate CC’s:
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/article2120072.ece
“the World Bank will buy carbon credits of 350,000 temporary certified emission reductions (tCERs) for plantations raised over 4,003 hectares in the first phase till 2017.
[…]
The World Bank committed to buying nearly 350,000 tCERs. “This became possible after Spain committed to purchasing tCERs from the World Bank,” he said.
[…]
However, the process of physical verification of the plantations raised so far on 3,000 hectares has not started yet.
“An independent team of evaluators will soon tour the state to study the exact growth of the biomass,” said project director R.K. Kapoor.
Project officials said the exact rate of purchase of carbon credits would be determined on the growth of biomass. The normal range is $4.5-5 per tCER.”
The Green political religion and its guilt trip and indulgence business fascinates me more every day.
Junkink says:
June 25, 2011 at 2:17 pm
“Please don’t make a habit of using graphs that don’t have zero at the origin. ”
Quotes are always presented in an auto-scaled fashion; one gets used to it. Never expect anything else whenever you see a price chart.
Lawrie Ayres says:
June 25, 2011 at 3:36 pm
“All we need now is for Angela Merkel to be displaced and Europe will return to the real world. ”
The alternative to Angela Merkel (conservative; at least allegedly) would be a Red-Green government or, even worse, Green-Red with Greens having the higher share. The consequences would be agonizing to devastating, depending on the exact level of incompetence.
Unfortunately, we have a very large proportion of urban arch-Green voters. Don’t pray for the end of Angela. You don’t know what you’re wishing for.
That´s the night the lights went out in the EU! That´s the night that they hung an innocent CO2! Hopefully this will be the end of this nonsense along with the death of the Kyoto Protocol.
P.S. Anthony you might want to take a look at that “can´t hardly” part of the headline. Maybe “they can hardly give EU carbon credits away” instead?
Rúnar
DirkH … while I would sympathize with the German people, a Germany doomed by insane green policies might save a few other countries.