subscribe to this pageBrazil Claims First With Carbon Auction
By MICHAEL ASTOR Associated Press Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Brazil's largest city sold millions of dollars worth of carbon credits at an auction Wednesday in a deal that experts said paves the way for developing countries to make money fighting global warming.
Brazil's Mercantile and Futures Exchange called Sao Paulo's sale of $18.5 million in carbon credits to Dutch-Belgian Fortis Bank the first such sale to be held on a regulated stock market and a significant step toward institutionalizing the carbon market.
Under the Kyoto Treaty on greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, companies that generate large amounts of polluting carbon dioxide and methane can buy offsetting credits from projects that remove contaminants.
Until Wednesday's auction on the Brazil stock exchange, companies such as Fortis mostly purchased credits from individual sellers. Experts said the sale could be a major step toward creating a clearer system that could make buying and selling easier.
Mark Hertsgaard
Letting polluters off the hook
MARK HERTSGAARD: Unlike lead or asbestos, we can't just ban greenhouse gases. That would shut down America's factories and vehicles overnight. But if we put the right price on greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, we'll use less of them.
The easiest way to do that is a carbon tax. That would increase the prices of gasoline, electricity and other fuels. But we could cut payroll taxes to offset any harm to the poor or the larger economy.
Most proposals in Congress, however, favor supposedly putting the market in charge. Under the so-called cap-and-trade system, the right to emit carbon would become a commodity.
The government would issue carbon emissions permits. Big polluters could buy the right to pollute from companies that haven't used up their permitted pollution levels.
We'd reduce the permits over time, giving companies an incentive: the less carbon they emit, the more money they could make by selling their unused quota to someone else.
The trouble is, Congress seems inclined to give these emission permits away for free, rather than have companies buy them at auction in an open market. Most global warming bills contain grandfather clauses that give companies free permits for up to 90 percent of their current emissions.
Friday, May 12, 2006
Carbon credits have some hot air
Many of the European Union's companies are registering carbon dioxide emissions far below their limits. And that's wreaking some havoc with the market set up to buy and sell carbon credits. Stephen Beard explains.
From The Times
August 28, 2007
To cancel out the CO2 of a return flight to India, it will take one poor villager three years of pumping water by foot. So is carbon offsetting the best way to ease your conscience?
...
But the treadle pump initiative raises the moral predicament of offsetting: decadent Westerners paying for their pollution to be neutralised by people in developing countries. “That particular project is an outrage because it’s so exploitative,” said Jutta Kill, of the green campaigning organisation Fern. “It’s just disgraceful.”
There's money to be made in the effort to halt global warming. One burgeoning business is the buying and selling of "carbon offsets" to American industry and consumers. What are these offset projects and how good are their claims? Claire Schoen reports.