Monday, June 25, 2007

Carbon trading: Where greed is green

When the British decided to end slavery, Wilberforce set up a slave market. Oh wait, that would have been stupid.
And repugnant-Climateer.

...a slice of a market now worth about $30 billion, but which could grow to $1 trillion within a decade.

"Carbon will be the world's biggest commodity market, and it could become the world's biggest market overall," said Redshaw, the head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital. But he said that in his current job, unlike some of his previous ones, including a stint as a British power trader at Enron, "I don't have to compromise on anything when I get out of bed in the morning."

If greed is suddenly good for the environment, then the seedbed for this vast new financial experiment is London. A report released Tuesday by International Financial Services London, a company promoting British-based financial services, said that British companies were the leading global investors in carbon projects and that more carbon was traded in London than in any other city.

...Carbon could become "one of the fasting-growing markets ever, with volumes comparable to credit derivatives inside of a decade," said Chris Leeds, 38, the head of emissions trading at Merrill Lynch in London, who plans to expand his team to five traders from two by the end of this year.

From the IHT
HT: PeakEnergy
Thanks to Professor David J.C. MacKay for the slave market analogy.