Styky's sticky on Carbon Trading

[Edward Kennedy]

Great info Styky, I love it...you are a great gal.

I think the same of Backhoe and all the other great contributors here but as many are members of my gender, I will forego the hugs emoticom...might give people who already have the wrong idea about me anothe rwrong opinion of me...

[styky]

May 26, 2010
Tax Dollars Funded Now Discredited National Academy Study

By The Washington Times, Tuesday, May 25, 2010

$6 million study is used to lobby for cap-and-tax

With public faith in the global-warming myth on the wane, leftist zealots are desperate to spin a new tale - and they’re spending your tax money to do it. Three years ago, Congress appropriated $5,856,600 for the National Academy of Sciences to complete a climate-change study. This bureaucratic attempt to cook the books, which was completed last week, may be too late to save this dying religion.

The academy now offers the taxpayer-funded research for download in three separate sections for $44 each. The first volume presents the case that human activities are warming the planet and that this “poses significant risks.” A second report urges that a cap-and-trade taxing system be implemented to reduce so-called greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The final section of the study explores strategies on adapting to the “reality” of climate change, meaning purported “extreme weather events like heavy precipitation and heat waves.” <a href=http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate>continued</a>

[styky]

Who could have predicted this....


Firms abusing Kyoto carbon trading scheme: watchdog

Firms participating in a Kyoto Protocol carbon scheme are abusing it by artificially inflating their greenhouse gas emissions, thereby allowing rich nations' emissions to rise significantly, a watchdog said on Saturday. (Reuters)<a href=http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE65C1FZ20100613>full story</a>

[styky]

New Zealand begins emissions trading scheme, meanwhile the Gore/Pachauri Chicago Climate Exchange is flatlining
Posted on June 30, 2010 by Anthony Watts

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. <a href=http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/30/new-zealand-begins-emissions-trading-scheme-meanwhile-the-gorepachauri-chicago-climate-exchange-is-flatlining/>continued</a>

[styky]

Put up your hand if you are shocked by this and didn't see it coming.

UN Finds Biggest ‘Enviro Scam’ In History

From an unfazed Associated Press:
UN board could rein in $2.7 billion carbon market

By John Heilprin, Associated Press Writer Sat Aug 21, 2010

UNITED NATIONS – An obscure U.N. board that oversees a $2.7 billion market intended to cut heat-trapping gases has agreed to take steps that could lead to it eventually reining in what European and U.S. environmentalists are calling a huge scam…<a href=http://sweetness-light.com/archive/un-finds-biggest-enviro-scam-in-history?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sweetness-light%2FsURR+%28Sweetness+%26+Light+-+Articles%29>full story</a>

[styky]

Corruption for dinner anyone? The Carbon Market Scandal

All round the world thousands of greenonomists recommend a “free market solution” to our so called pollution problem. But as I keep saying: this “free market” isn’t free. It’s a pale pathetic imitation: a “managed market”.

In Europe, if a factory produces CO2 (what factory doesn’t?) it can pay people in China and India to not produce an-equivalent-amount-of-CO2. Sounds sort of fine in intent except that paying people to not do something they were-going-to-do depends on knowing the future (and reminds us of a process known as extortion). That’s loophole number one. Officially it’s called “additionality”, which is a fancy way of saying people wouldn’t do something-in-particular to reduce emissions unless they got paid in carbon credits.

The Chinese and Indians, not being stupid, immediately gamed the system. Why wouldn’t they?

The irony of unintended consequences. Here’s how it goes:

1. HFC-23 is the godfather of greenhouse gases: it’s 11,700 times as powerful at warming as CO2 is.
2. The chemical makers are paid as much as $100,000 in carbon credits for every ton they destroy…
3. Suddenly making-and-then-destroying HFC-23 is very valuable business, so people rush to fill this “demand”.
4. HFC-23 is a byproduct of the process of making HCFC-22 (a refrigerant that’s made, as it happens, to satisfy UN treaty about reducing ozone.) Because HFC-23 is now far more valuable, the HCFC-22 becomes the byproduct, and it’s being overproduced).
5. Here’s the catch: HCFC-22 is itself a greenhouse gas… “the global warming impact of the HCFC-22 production… is five times higher than that of the HFC-23 itself, due to the high volume of HCFC-22 produced”. [<a href=http://www.eia-international.org/files/news600-1.pdf>Source link</a>]

To put it in perspective: In 2009 European installations surrendered 46 million HFC-23 CERs, worth an estimated €550 million. These CERs constitute the majority of offsets used by European companies (59% in 2009). [<a href=http://www.cdm-watch.org/?p=1065>Source</a>] <a href=http://joannenova.com.au/2010/08/corruption-for-dinner-anyone-the-carbon-market-scandal/#more-9986>More</a> » (Jo Nova)

[styky]

<a href=http://21stcenturywire.com/2010/08/27/the-great-collapse-of-the-chicago-climate-exchange/>The Great Collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange</a>

Plagued by a free fall in carbon emissions prices and the perennial failure of Washington to pass any binding Cap and Trade Bill, it seems that the Chicago Climate Exchange is on its last leg, announcing that it will be scaling back its operations. (Patrick Henningsen, 21st Century Wire)...................

[styky]

<a href=http://joannenova.com.au/2010/09/tax-versus-trade/>Tax versus Trade</a>
I feel like I keep stating the obvious. A carbon tax is bad because it’s unnecessary and nobody wastes money better than big government, but a carbon trading scheme is worse. ...............

[styky]

Gosh I never saw that one coming!

Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) have surged on international carbon markets in recent weeks after a UN board acted over concerns that chemical plants in China and elsewhere in the developing world were deliberately overproducing HFC 23, a potent greenhouse gas, in order to claim the saleable credits for subsequently destroying it.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9595c100-b90a ... abdc0.html

[styky]

Analyst says carbon market would work in Canada


By Dan Healing, Calgary Herald September 9, 2010

The cap-and-trade system of reining in greenhouse gas emissions is working in Europe and would work in Canada as well, says a London-based carbon trading research analyst.

Trevor Sikorski, in Calgary to give a presentation at a conference today sponsored by U.K. investment bank Barclays Capital, said his company has traded four billion tonnes of carbon since the European Union decision to proceed in 2004. That's more than any other. The bank has three full-time traders who do nothing but trade carbon, he said.


Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/A ... z0z2qAFKD3

[styky]

Terence Corcoran: The UN carbon fiasco

Terence Corcoran October 4, 2010 – 10:51 pm

New book calls for reform of climate agency as thousands of delegates meet in Tianjin, China

The slow death rattle of the United Nation’s climate-change apparatus grew a little louder yesterday as thousands of delegates descended on Tianjin, China, for a five-day negotiating session. It’s the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s last chance to reach a global carbon-emission agreement before a final meeting in Cancun, Mexico, in December.


Read more: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2010/1 ... z11XcPw3uB

[styky]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ur4s9sfUS8

Nobel Prize Winning Climate Scientist Slams NDP Leader

[styky]

RIP: Carbon trading

In a little reported move, the <a href=http://greenhellblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/ccx-ends-carbon-trading.pdf>Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) is ending carbon trading this year</a> — the very purpose for which it was founded. CCX will remain open for business, however, as it transitions into the murky world of dealing in carbon offsets. <a href=http://greenhellblog.com/2010/10/26/carbon-trading-rip/>read more</a>

[styky]

maginary exchange goes poof

The green scheme known as the Chicago Climate Exchange will stop trading hot air at the end of the year
http://www.winnipegsun.com/comment/colu ... 10681.html
By EZRA LEVANT, QMI Agency

Last Updated: November 14, 2010 1:00am

The Chicago Climate Exchange is shutting down at the end of the year.

Nobody’s buying carbon credits.

Right now, days go by when not a single trade is done. When trades are done, carbon dioxide sells for just five cents a ton.

It’s over.

In related news, the Pixie Dust Exchange has plenty of eager sellers but still no buyers. And the opening of the unicorn exhibit at the zoo has been postponed indefinitely.

None of these things exist in real life. Except the Chicago Climate Exchange. It was given millions of dollars in start-up subsidies, including from Chicago’s Joyce Foundation when Barack Obama was a board member. Buying and selling imaginary carbon credits was going to lead us to a bold, green future, when people would pay billions — Al Gore said trillions! — to buy hot air.

If only Enron and Bernie Madoff had been smart enough to call their pyramid schemes “green funds.”

The Climate Exchange was created by a professor named Richard Sandor. In 2002, Time magazine called him a “Hero of the Planet” for that act.

But as the exchange’s own website suggests, companies bought and sold carbon as a public-relations exercise — to greenwash their operations in the eyes of the gullible media.

Big guns like Goldman Sachs bought a stake in the exchange hoping for far more. They were betting that with Obama in the White House, carbon trading would become mandatory under the Democrats’ “cap and trade” scheme. That was the plan Obama said would cause “the rise of the oceans to slow and the planet to heal.”

But that law died in the U.S. mid-term elections, the worst showing for Democrats since 1948. Carbon trading was one of the reasons: In a TV ad, Senate candidate Joe Manchin actually took a rifle and used the cap and trade bill as target practice.

And he won.

And he’s a Democrat.

Don’t worry about poor Prof. Sandor, though. The Investors Business Daily reports he managed to sell his stake in the exchange for

$98.5 million.

Too bad the Exchange is being shut down. Because at five cents a ton, the entire oilsands, all 100 companies up there, could buy Al Gore’s good housekeeping seal of approval for just $1.5 million a year.

The exchange made it all seem so real. You could even buy or sell carbon dioxide with different “vintages” — that’s what they called hot air from various years — as if they were fine wines.

But $1.5 million is still a lot of money to spend buying an imaginary product — moral permission from foreigners to run our Canadian economy. That’s a lot less than the

$2 billion carbon sequestration scheme proposed by the government of Alberta — a plan to bury pixie dust, or hot air, or maybe both, in the ground.

All of Canada’s carbon dioxide emissions combined were 734 megatons in 2008. At five cents a ton, that’s just $36.7 million to buy an indulgence for the whole country — for every car, factory, airplane and farting cow.

Just $36.7 million? That’s not much more than the travel budget for the Canadian delegation to the Copenhagen Conference and other global-warming parties last year.

Sure, it’s a shakedown. But it’s a pretty modest one. Just $1.10 per Canadian to push the mute button for a whole year on hysterical global-warming activists? That’s a bargain.

As the unloved Chicago Climate Exchange dies, a dangerous myth dies too: That carbon credits are worth anything, and that somehow trading these worthless, imaginary credits, could replace the jobs we’d kill in real industries.

No; carbon credits are a tax, a tax on environmental hysteria and appeasement-oriented companies. If Goldman Sachs can’t make money off them, no-one can.

Next time someone tells you that we’re all going to get rich off some government green scheme, tell them you’ve got a little climate exchange to sell them, and you’ll throw in a unicorn too.

— Read Levant’s blog at ezralevant.com

[styky]

Death to the Chicago Climate Exchange ($7.40 to a nickel per CO2 ton, the market has spoken)

http://www.masterresource.org/2010/11/d ... -exchange/