"Europe's cap-and-trade system for reducing the release of greenhouse gases is broken, but not everybody wants to fix it. Industry has profited immensely from the plummeting prices of CO2 emissions certificates, and from lax checks on questionable environmental projects undertaken overseas....
Saving the climate? It doesn't seem all that difficult at first glance. All you have to do is fly from Germany to Zambia once in a while, as the German energy giant RWE's environment protection team does. It has made frequent trips to the capital Lusaka in recent years to distribute a total of 30,000 small stoves -- RWE's contribution to a good cause.
The stoves were intended to help poor families cook in a more environmentally friendly way. Biomass was to replace charcoal as cooking fuel. In an advertising brochure for RWE, the company that "travels around the world to help our climate" touts the campaign with the slogan "New Cooking Pots -- Less CO2." But RWE doesn't seem to have included such factors as air travel and the production of the stoves in its calculations.
Besides, the project wasn't entirely altruistic, because RWE will receive credits for its effort. The stoves in Lusaka are expected to save 1.5 million tons of CO2 by 2020, and in return, RWE's coal-fired power plants would be allowed to emit 1.5 million tons elsewhere. This sale of indulgences is called a "Clean Development Mechanism" (CDM). With such questionable projects in emerging and developing countries, which even include the renovation of coalmines in China, European companies can simply calculate away about 20 percent of their emissions.
In the end, the flood of such projects undermines the entire emissions trading system. "The most important tool of climate protection no longer works," says Eva Filzmoser of Carbon Market Watch in Brussels. Four years ago, the Austrian national began a solo effort to take a closer look at the emissions trading market. She still believed in the idea at the time. But Filzmoser found herself confronted with an industry that had grown to a volume of $90 billion almost overnight, an industry complete with certifiers, forecasters, dealers and hackers, who trafficked in certificates and created more and more absurd projects.
They included the supposed cleanup of African garbage dumps, as well as the retrofitting of old coolant factories in China, which only seemed to be in operation because they yielded climate certificates.
It is because of Filzmoser and her staff of five employees that, starting in May, at least the most questionable of these projects will no longer be approved by the United Nations Climate Change secretariat. "The trade has turned into a big flop," she says, "a system of fraud."
The European Commission estimates that 1.7 billion tons in excess pollution rights were on the market in late 2012. Because of this oversupply, the price of emitting a ton of CO2 plummeted to only €4. The CDM projects were not the only reason for the price drop. Because of overly optimistic economic forecasts prior to the economic crisis and the correspondingly generous allotments, many of the 11,000 power plants and factories in Europe required to participate in emissions trading are now sitting on a mountain of unused certificates....
To reach the target, however, many companies don't have to do anything at all, and not just because the cushion of their accumulated certificates often keeps them going for years. The EU will soon have reached its not overly ambitious emissions reduction targets because of the economic slowdown. As production dropped, many smokestacks were simply shut down.
Given such conditions, coal is seeing a renaissance that was hardly thought possible. Because certificates are so cheap, it is much more cost-effective to pollute the air with coal-fired power plants than switch to more environmentally friendly energy generation technologies.
To address the problem, European Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard has proposed a drastic step: She wants to temporarily cut supply by remove 900 million emissions certificates from the system. The proposal is known as backloading. Not too long ago Hedegaard, from Denmark, was still convinced that the system was working "very well," but now she says: "It is not wise to deliberately continue to flood a market that is already oversupplied."
The industry lobby in Brussels is making a show of being outraged. The general director of BusinessEurope, one of the most powerful lobbying groups, wrote to European Parliament President Martin Schulz to demand a debate on backloading. For each of its counterproposals, the industry also presented supporters from the parliament, most of them liberal and center-right members from Germany and Poland.
The lobbyists' fight doesn't seem to be lost yet. While the Environment Committee voted in favor of backloading, the Industry Committee opposed it. The critical vote is planned for mid-April.
But industry's anti-backloading front in Brussels doesn't seem to be unanimous. Some companies have changed sides, like Düsseldorf-based energy giant E.on. In a joint memorandum with the non-profit public policy group Germanwatch, the company said it supported backloading. "Emissions trading is dead," E.on CEO Johannes Teyssen said last year. Nothing, he added, shows more clearly that the system has lost its effectiveness than
the fact that brown coal is currently winning out in the competition with other energy sources.
Unlike pure production operations, energy groups like E.on could pass on almost any price to their customers, says Gordon Moffat of the European Confederation of Iron and Steel Industries. "Emissions trading seems tailor-made for the energy sector.""...via Tom Nelson
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Ed. note: It's fraud against the mute European taxpayer and hasn't improved CO2 emissions. US CO2 emissions have dropped drastically without cap and trade. If European parasites were really interested in dropping CO2 emissions, they would do what the US has done. But they're not:
11/23/11, "Europe's $287 billion carbon 'waste': UBS report," The Australian, by Sid Maher
"SWISS banking giant UBS says the European Union's emissions trading scheme has cost the continent's consumers $287 billion for "almost zero impact" on cutting carbon emissions."...EU CO2 trading provided "windfall profits" to participants paid for by "electricity customers.""
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4/21/12, “Why [CO2] Emissions Are Declining in the U.S. But Not in Europe,” by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, newgeography.com
.
“As we note below in a new article for Yale360, a funny thing happened: U.S. emissions started
going down in 2005 and are
expected to decline further over the next decade.”
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News of US CO2 plunge has been described as:
- “Surprising,“
- “little noticed,“
- “dramatic,“
- “stunner,“
- “most people are surprised to learn,“
- “quiet but tremendous progress,”
- “major long term implications,”
- “game changing,”
- “shocker,”
- “huge contrast to the forecast.”
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8/9/12, "Green Fail: UN Carbon Trading Scheme Increases Pollution," Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia
"Behold a green failure so colossal even Via Meadia is surprised: a UN carbon-credit trading program intended to reduce global concentrations of greenhouse gases has instead led a handful of factories in the developing world to massively increase them."...
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