Wednesday, November 7, 2007

EcoSecurities wants CDM board with market experience

From Reuters:

EcoSecurities Group wants to have bureaucratic regulators replaced in the United Nations-administered carbon trading scheme, the carbon cutting project developer said on Wednesday, a day after cutting its profit forecasts due to delays in that scheme.

"We would like to see a CDM executive board that is populated with more people with direct market regulatory experience, financial regulators, utility regulators, people with direct experience," Marc Stuart, EcoSecurities co-founder and director of new business development told Reuters.

"With all due respect, these guys are generally negotiators that have been put in there and they are responsible for $40 to $50 billion of created value over the next few years. Understanding what is material and what is not is not necessarily one of their strong points," he added....MORE

Here's economist John Kay in the Financial Times last year:

...The first problem was the lawyers, whose instinct is to write rules to cover every possible contingency. But no one can anticipate every possible contingency. Some economists believe in, and lawyers aspire to, a world in which contracts and property rights are completely specified. But business must face imperfect information today and inescapable uncertainty tomorrow. The genius of the market system is that it responds flexibly, if imperfectly, to a future that will not have been predicted. That is why clear and transparent regulation is hard to achieve in a market economy.

The second problem was the lobbyists. When a market is created through political action, rather than emerging spontaneously from the needs of buyers and sellers, business will seek to influence market design for commercial advantage.

The third problem was people with good ideas. Every simple concept can be improved, every new idea can be elaborated. But those who would kill several birds with one stone generally end up missing all of them....