Wednesday, November 24, 2010

With the Death of the Chicago Climate Exchange Is the ECX on Life Support? (ICE)

Dear S.E.C.,
I know you're busy right now but when you get a minute could you ask the Intercontinental Exchange for some details of their $604 Million purchase of Climate Exchange, PLC last April?

As I said in "The Chicago Climate Exchange has Died, Richard Sandor Pockets $98 Million and the Intercontinental Exchange Gets Bagged Big Time (ICE; GS)":
The purchase of CLE by ICE stinks to high heaven. I'm sure a bright young para-legal could figure it out in a couple hours....
Here's more from Troy Media via The Epoch Times:

Carbon Emissions Schemes Are Going Up in Smoke
The war on carbon dioxide emissions isn’t going well. Indeed, while the next climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, at the end of this month will make a show of sifting the geopolitical wreckage from last December’s climate summit, any real prospect for coordinated international action is, post-Copenhagen, dead in the political water.

Making matters worse, the “bête noire” of climate alarmists is, once again, reigning supreme: King Coal.

Why False Hopes?

All this begs the question: With all hopes for a global CO2 impact blown away, why are politicians tenaciously clinging to the fiction that regionalized carbon-trading schemes—like the Western Climate Initiative—can succeed where national and international ones have failed?

Speaking to Troy Media, Dalibor Rohac, Research Fellow at London’s Legatum Institute, explains: “If you believe that CO2 emissions are a major factor driving climate change, you need to reduce emissions globally. Cutting emissions unilaterally through, say, increasing the price of carbon in one country or group of countries, leads to carbon leakage as carbon-intensive industries will move to jurisdictions where emissions are not restricted.”

Without international and national binding agreements, the reluctance of industry to participate is already reflected in the slow death of carbon-trading initiatives.

CCX Closing, ECX Next?

By the end of the year, the Chicago Climate Exchange, the only U. S. national carbon market that trades all six greenhouse gases, will quietly close its doors to its carbon-credits business—the main purpose for which it was set up. While the Atlanta-based Intercontinental Exchange purchased the CCX only last April, its voluntary but legally binding system has reportedly ground to a halt in the absence of a federally enacted cap-and-trade scheme.

Meanwhile, across the water, the European Climate Exchange, the leading platform for the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme, is still trading. But when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 with its requirement for mandatory carbon caps, the European Climate Exchange is widely expected to go the way of its Chicago sister—and a new British report makes clear why.

According to the report by Sandbag, a group calling for even tighter greenhouse controls, the entire five-year period of the EU’s ETS is set to deliver miniscule carbon savings of less than one-third of 1 percent of total emissions. The world’s oldest carbon-trading scheme has simply failed to make any serious impact on global carbon emissions, the purpose for which all such schemes exist.

In June 2010, Japan put on hold plans to introduce emission-trading laws. Australia has delayed any decision on a carbon-trading scheme until 2013 at the earliest, and at the Copenhagen conference, India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh stated flatly, “India will not accept any emission-reduction target—period.”

In North America, however, local politicians still insist that regional initiatives, including the Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the Eastern United States and the Western Climate Initiative in the U.S. West and Canada, could prosper.

The WCI, for instance, is a partnership of seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces. The WCI wants to establish a cap-and-trade system by January 2012 that, ultimately, aims to reduce regional greenhouse-gas emissions to 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

“This is simply puzzling,” says Rohac. “Regional initiatives are unlikely to have any effect whatsoever on global emissions and therefore on climate change.”...MORE
If you've never heard of Sandbag here's one of our posts:
European Union's emissions trading scheme set to deliver carbon savings of less than a third of 1% of total emissions as ArcelorMittal scores £1.5bn. (MT)
Here's a story from their website:
Sandbag founder appointed to House of Lords
And one of their reports: