Readers may recall this story this past week at WUWT: European Carbon Trading Hits Another Record Low.
It was a short lived record, beaten again the very next day.
Today, from Reuters Point Carbon, a view of the end times for carbon trading:
EU carbon plummets 10 pct on German sale cancellation
18 Jan 2013 17:12
LONDON, Jan 18 (Reuters Point Carbon) – European carbon prices plunged by as much as 10 percent on Friday after energy bourse EEX cancelled a German auction for 4 million EU Allowances, citing a lack of demand.
See also this essay at WUWT: The carbon trading money tree
Related articles
- EU Carbon Permits Plunge to Record After Germany Cancels Sale (bloomberg.com)
- Eco Scams: SEO Consultant announces carbon market worth plunged by over a third in 2012 (blacklistednews.com)
Netherlands suspends U.N. emission project approvals
LONDON, Jan 18 (Reuters Point Carbon) – The Netherlands will not approve CO2-cutting projects submitted by Dutch firms seeking U.N. carbon credits until new rules under the Kyoto Protocol become clearer, the country’s emissions registry said on Friday, dealing a further blow to investors…
http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/1.2144128?&ref=searchlist
ArcelorMittal, Belgium’s Wallonia go to court over CO2 permits
LONDON, Jan 18 (Reuters Point Carbon) – Steel giant ArcelorMittal and Belgium’s Walloon government are locked in a bitter legal battle over 8 million euros worth of EU carbon permits, a government spokesman told Reuters Point Carbon this week…
http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/1.2144138?&ref=searchlist
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Looks to me that all the rats are deserting the sinking ship that is CAGW in droves. To paraphrase one of the warm-mongers – I can’ t remember which one – “In the end they will all disappear quite quickly”. Mark “death spiral” Serreze I think it was.
If Germany is shifting from nuclear to coal, why aren’t they soaking up all the carbon credits and spiking the price?
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Benjamin Franklin
James says:
January 19, 2013 at 3:09 pm
“If Germany is shifting from nuclear to coal, why aren’t they soaking up all the carbon credits and spiking the price?”
Because we are awash with carbon credits. Remember, Kyoto was designed by our Bundestag.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/secret-history-climate-alarmism?page=1
janef20 says:
January 19, 2013 at 9:39 am
How will BBC pension-fund managers explain this to shareholders?
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It warms my heart to think of all those BBC climate activists looking forward to their retirement years eating canned dog food and shivering in their windmill powered homes. To quote star trek – revenge is a dish best served cold.
What is clear is that “carbon quatloos” prevents any “expansion” so self limits to zero price…
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Quatloo
Any business with a brain will do NO “expansion” in any location with a carbon {tax, fee, trading scheme, indulgence, allowance, …} and will instead head off to China or Texas at the most economical pace. (That is, fast…)
Somewhat OT; How is it that “Green Power” generated electrons are separated in power transmission lines?
Thanks for the responses to “…what governments are now requiring……?” This is pretty scary stuff. No one with a brain would ever support the idea that taxes can solve a (nonexistent) problem. It’s really quite insane. Hence, the only real supporters of this nonsense must be the financial elites who wish to create another false currency (carbon credits) in which to speculate, invest and leverage their vast fortunes. Their government handmaidens find it attractive because they have overspent to a point where they need to get money anywhere they can.
I doubt that most people really understand any of this.
A carbon allowance is equal to one tonne of carbon dioxide emissions.
The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme is mandatory for thousands of power stations, Industrial plants, airlines and other energy-intensive industries in the EU. Such industries are legally obliged to buy carbon allowances to cover their annual allowance as imposed by their governments based on their historical carbon dioxide emissions.
Total carbon dioxide emissions for the year must be reported by the participants to their respective national authorities at the end of every year. The companies must then surrender to their governments the allowances they have been forced to buy to cover their emissions. The allowances are then cancelled. They can sell any surplus allowances.
If a company fails to buy enough allowances to cover its emissions it will be subject to a heavy fine and be compelled to make up the shortfall in future years.
However the European Union has estimated that there will be up to 2 billion surplus EU carbon allowances in 2013 causing them in effect to be worthless.
However the European Commission is considering several ways to rig the market in order to artificially raise the price:
“1. Increasing the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction target for 2020 from 20% to 30% below 1990 levels;
2. Retiring a certain number of phase three allowances permanently;
3. Revising the 1.74% annual reduction in the number of allowances to make it steeper;
4. Bringing more sectors into the EU ETS;
5. Limiting access to international credits;
6. Introducing discretionary price management mechanisms such as a price management reserve.”
http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets/reform/index_en.htm
In essence it is a way to conjure money out of nothing and dramatically increase costs for those industries legally bound to participate, which they inevitably pass on to customers.
mfo:
In your post at January 20, 2013 at 7:42 am you say
And later in that post you say
Not really. Nothing is conjured our of nothing.
The EU ETS is merely a tax on industries which emit CO2 and – in common with all taxes on any industry – the cost is passed on to customers.
Richard
Stimulated by this post, I have spent the last few days hunting the web to try and make sense of carbon trading. As of now, I have more questions than answers. So maybe someone here could help?
Let me disregard for a moment that CO2 may not need regulation any more than water vapor (which is after all a greenhouse gas, produced in abundance by the activities if human beings, and mostly beneficial).
What I found out so far:
It seems that pollutant trading is actually an American idea and seems to have worked well for lead in gas and sulfur in emissions. The idea is to put a price on the emission of the pollutant. It is, in essence, a tax. Because of the trade component, the primary cuts of the pollutant will be made in those industries who can do this for the smallest cost. It seems that the European cap and trade has many problems, because individual national interests have distorted the initial set-up, to make it ineffective (for example, Germany got all the credits it needed from dismantling and rebuilding the antiquated infrastructure of what was East Germany – which it would have done anyway). The cost for carbon trading cannot be measured simply by adding up the dollars paid for higher prices of fuel, electricity and consumer goods, as the revenue generated by selling carbon credits finds its way back in the economy.
My questions:
1. How much of the total cost for carbon trading to a society is due to a bloated additional bureaucracy to administer the whole thing?
2. In the case of California, where will the tax revenues from carbon trading go?
3. How do various states / countries go about making this tax non-regressive?
4. What percentage of the world’s population must participate for this to make a dent in CO2?
5. What is the estimated real cost per year per person for California?
Ric Werme says:
January 19, 2013 at 11:31 am
I can’t speak for the EU system, but here in New England and three other states any electric power producer using fossil carboniferous fuel and producing more than 25 MW (or something like that) has to purchase CO2 allowances. These are available either at auction or a speculative market. Problem is, the shift to natural gas, the recession, less attractive manufacturing environment, etc. have meant that recent auctions are undersold, so all the sales have been at the floor price, last year it was $1.93 per short ton. The speculative market has been a few cents below that. No windfall profits here!
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I am sure you know this already, Ric, but just for this forum I wanted to mention that the only reason the allowance price is at $1.93 per short ton is because it is the reserve price, they can’t sell it any lower in spite of the glut of unsold allowances.
One more point: When the market report is issued, they point out the CO2 savings due to the energy use improvements done by the government spending the money. The first year, the State of Massachusetts spent over $1,000,000 on solar heating for community swimming pools! Sounds like a tax to me. And I can assure you that at less than $2 per allowance, power generators are not spending a dime on equipment that would reduce their CO2 emissions, which was not the intent of the program when it was adopted. One teeny-tiny change in a power plant can have much more impact on CO2 emissions than all the solar heated swimming pools in New England.