After hitting record lows back in January, there was a plan to prop up the EU carbon market. That worked…for a while. Then the backloading plan was rejected, and the real market forces took over.
From: Environmental leader: EU Carbon Prices Plunge to Record Lows
Carbon prices hit record lows today after the European Parliament rejected an emergency plan to boost the ailing EU carbon market.
In a 334-315 vote, with more than 60 abstentions, lawmakers rejected a proposal to postpone — or backload — the auctioning of 900 million EU Emissions Trading Scheme allowances from the years 2013-2015 to 2019-2020. This measure was intended to rebalance supply and demand, and reduce price volatility.
European commissioner for climate action Connie Hedegaard said the plan will now go back to the Parliament’s environment committee for further consideration.
And more headlines:
Story here: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2013/04/16/eu-carbon-prices-plunge-to-record-lows/
Related articles
- Carbon in Worst Quarter Since 2011 Set for Rescue Vote (bloomberg.com)
- Why Europe’s Carbon Market is Crashing (businessweek.com)
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They’re trying their best to avoid the unavoidable; it’s akin to the woes of the Euro, except there’s maybe light at the end of the tunnel for the Euro. The Carbon Credit market is on the roof. Soon it will be nearing the edge. Sometime this autumn it may just be swept under the rug and forgotten about. The thud was probably Mme. Hedegaard’s head hitting the wall for the umpteenth time.
Kurt in Switzerland
Heaven forbid that all the desperate shrieking from the Hockey Rinky Tink gets noticed by the MSM as well…..
The Chicago Climate Exchange folded some time ago with the collapse of carbon credit prices and the collapse of trading.
We’re just lucky so far that the banksters have not yet created a financial bubble around these ephemeral ‘commodities’ that lack even the real estate that was supposed to sustain the Asset Backed Commercial Paper involved in the 2008 crisis.
Good news. Kill that nonsense dead and dry up another money making scam for the big banks that only hurts the real economy.
Reality is a strict taskmaster. In this information age, it is becoming more difficult to propagate myths and bad ideas for a long period of time. It still happens, but it is just becoming more difficult.
With many governments all around the world on the brink of bankruptcy, many of these bankrupt countries are wasting $100’s billions to “fix” the Catastrophic Global Warming “problem” that doesn’t even exist.
The financial markets are finally starting to realize this CAGW hoax is a farce and are making trades accordingly; SHORT THIS SUCKER TO Zero!!!!
There will be a few smart traders that’ll make a bundle shorting carbon credits.
Let us hope that this seriously undermines both the EU carbon market and the Euro, both drivers of poverty, unemployment and misery in Europe – all at the expense of socialist ideology.
However, let us not cheer just yet. The EC has a long track record in asking the same question time and again of the same constituency until it gets the ‘right’ answer. I note that Connie Hedupherarse ‘said the plan will now go back to the Parliament’s environment committee for further consideration’. This means that it will be tinkered with by the committee, virtually no changes will be made to the wording or intent and it will come back to the Parliament for another vote.
Meanwhile, the thugs of the EC who muscled Greece’s democratically-elected President out of power, and Italy’s democratically-elected president out of power, will have been going round in the interval, either hitting weak MEPs over the head with threats or offering financial inducements (yes, of course, using other people’s money) in order to swing a few votes.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
From the linked article:
As of April 1, Britain’s carbon-emitting businesses pay significantly more for energy than their European counterparts under the UK’s new carbon price floor. The emissions tax, set by the UK government in 2011, starts at £16 ($24.30) per ton of carbon emitted this year and rises to £30 ($45.63) by 2020.
The UK’s high carbon price floor represents a threat to competitiveness for British companies, particularly in energy-intensive sectors, warns Richard Gledhill, partner PricewaterhouseCoopers sustainability and climate change.
What Richard Gledhill of PWC fails to point out of course is that domestic energy prices are ‘skyrocketing’ (TM Obama) and that energy poverty in UK is rapidly increasing and people are dying – 2000 extra deaths in the first 2 weeks of March alone. The UK politicians do not seem to care about this at all. That number of deaths on the roads in March would have brought the country to a halt all sort of police actions and questions in Parliament. But an extra 2000 elderly people dying from cold isn’t even worth a mention. Taxes are far more important.
The sad part of this is that the main scam artists , such has St Gore , have made money when the going was ‘good’ and already got out . Its others that will lose their shirts .
I wouldn’t mind getting a tonne of carbon for a few Euro. Will they deliver it to the house, preferably in pebble-sized pieces? As the apparently-endless heating season continues here in central Pennsylvania with a nigh-unprecedented third refilling of the oil tanks approaching, I’m debating the economics of an outside furnace in which I could burn cheap local coal and (late at night) household garbage like cardboard.
It could also burn “free for the hauling” scrap wood, but at the known sources with broken shipping palettes etc, these days they are always picked clean!
@ur momisugly GlynnMhor says: April 16, 2013 at 9:59 am
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh don’t give Wall St. investment bankers any ideas !!!
I took my retirement when I was a teenager and in my early twenties. Therefore I don’t worry about my pension, like those poor fellows who work for the BBC. Their pension fund was heavily invested in carbon credits, as I recall.
Of course, in terms of reporting the truth about Global Warming, the BBC has been retired for years now. So maybe it won’t bug them that Al Gore robbed them blind.
Kurt in Switzerland “… woes of the Euro, except there’s maybe light at the end of the tunnel for the Euro.”
Just what light is that? The down express coming the other way?
The euro is doomed. It was born doomed, it has lived doomed and it will die.
Germany is going to leave the eurozone (taking with it all the real money) and the rest will sink without trace, like the Carbon price!
Soon only the out of control climate alarmists here in California will have a CO2 tax “market” which will also fail in the long run since the alarmist strategy of mandated global CO2 reduction has in fact already been demonstrated to be an abysmal failure.
Parliament rejected an emergency plan to boost the ailing EU carbon market.
———————————————-
Well at least they didn’t declare it “too big to fail” as obama would have done.
Notice how the great democracy that is the EU works. The vote was ‘wrong’ according to Connie so the committee will mull it over. Looks like we (Europe) were a bit premature celebrating victory in the Cold War.
Government regulatory cartels are like vampires — they just keep coming back until you stake them in the heart. Take this quote from the referenced Business Week article:
The article by the way includes the obligatory scary photograph of water vapor coming out of cooling towers made to look threateningly orange by artful use of sunset.
Remember the Roberts rule (John Roberts, Chief Justice US Supreme Court): as long as they call it a “tax”, the government can assume any power, even if specifically prohibited in other parts of the Constitution. If the emission trading scheme doesn’t get enough traction, they will just replace it with a straight tax.
I’m rather curious what all the EU governments are going to do about their insane CO2 regulations. Only X grammes CO2 per kilometer driven is now a car sales slogan. You get tax rebates on ‘ecotax’ if you buy cars with the least CO2 output, but ofcourse with electric cars they don’t count the CO2 produced in making the electricity so you pay 0% ecotax.
Meanwhile Secretary Swiftboat is droning to our Chinese drone makers about how human caused global WARMING is the biggest problem in the Universe. Many of us are thinking human cause THERMONUCLEAR WARMING by North Korea, Pakistan, Iran or Israel might be a bigger, more immediate problem. Following the advice of Mark Twain….”Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference”….the Chinese agreed to keep making our subsidized windmills and solar panels….with their coal fired generators. Having the highest priced statesmanship is not the proper measure of success….but it does demand higher taxes !
At this point, if I were an EU bureaucrat I would cease a percentage of people’s bank accounts and use the money to prop up the carbon credit market (at least until I could get my own money out). In EU bureaucrat speak this would be called a “win-win”.
Are, the evils of auto- correct. Cease –> Seize
It’s interesting, but without units on the graph, the story is much less useful to the reader.
What they are trading is akin to tulips, minus the tulips.
Peter Jones said on April 16, 2013 at 11:52 am:
Huh? Y-axis was Euros, X-axis was calendar dates.
I’ve been thinking and predicting all along that backfilling is just stuffing rags and waste paper in the dike breach. A soggy end is certain.