Friday, November 9, 2007

Carbon traders demand more U.N. market experts. And, A Delivery Squeeze Developing?

Here's something that got misplaced in the link-vault.
(does anyone have a program to manage a rolling inventory of 20K links, spread over a couple servers and four PC's? We're looking for some sort of Brain-Computer Interface thingy. DARPA?)

Regular readers know we are not enamored of business models based on rent-seeking, politicians and bureaucrats being your ultimate masters. From a March 23 post:
Heed the words of Sen. Simon Cameron (R&D!-Pa.):
"The honest politician is one who when he is bought, will stay bought."
A few days ago we posted EcoSecurities wants CDM board with market experience and the day before, UPDATE 2-EcoSecurities warns on earnings, shares crash aa

Here are the money quotes from a different Reuters story, Wednesday:
"With all due respect, these guys are generally (climate change) negotiators...Understanding what is material and what is not is not necessarily one of their strong points," he said on the sidelines of a conference on global carbon markets.

The head of the CDM project judging panel, Lex de Jonge, accepted that having some panel members with a financial background could help.

"Having knowledge of the financial background would be one of the useful factors a board member should bring," de Jonge told Reuters. "But it would not be very productive if all board members had that background. We need the variety."Continued...

Finally, here's the lost piece from Carbon finance from last month that gives the backround:

Warnings grow of 2008 CER delivery squeeze

Supplies of certified emission reductions (CERs) during 2008 could be tighter than many expect and cause problems for those that have promised deliveries, according to market participants.

The problem stems from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) Executive Board issuing fewer CERs to projects than many originally anticipated, and being slow at introducing new CDM methodologies for greenhouse gas emission reduction projects.

And a leading CDM project developer has warned that a technicality could see the board swamped in coming months with “requests for deviations” from monitoring methodologies, dramatically slowing issuance.

“For me, there’s quite a tight situation for CERs in 2008, for methodology reasons and because the Executive Board is under-issuing. If this continues in 2008, it will create a real bottleneck,” said Emmanuel Fages, a carbon analyst at Société Générale in Paris.

“Buyers have the feeling that there are many CERs in the market because financial institutions are selling. But often, they are really [just] selling forward and are still short of the CERs they sold,” he said....MORE

Which is the reason ECO.L dropped like a turd from a tall cow, according to management.