All the U.S. cap-and-trade plans, Waxman-Markey, the Lieberman (I-GE) et al iterations etc., had allowance giveaways to those companies that would cozy up to the politicians and I coulda been one of them. Damn.
And these guys don't even say Danke to the hausfraus who foot the bill.
I would have.
CO2 got as low as 15.47 euros ($21.96) a tonne this morning.
From the Guardian:
Europe's top industrial firms have a cache of 240m pollution permit
European Commission estimates energy-intensive sector will have accumulated allowances worth €7-12bn by the end of 2012
Some of Europe's largest industrial companies gained billions of euros from the carbon emission rules they lobbied fiercely against, new analysis reveals today.
Ten steel and cement companies have amassed 240m carbon pollution permits from generous allocations, according to a report by Sandbag, the carbon trading thinktank, seen by the Guardian.
The free permits, granted to companies with a market value of €4bn (£3.5bn), can be sold or kept for future use. The European commission estimates that the entire energy-intensive sector will have accumulated allowances worth €7bn-€12bn by the end of 2012.
"More and more businesses see that Europe's future lies in a highly efficient economy with low pollution," Baroness Worthington, Sandbag's founding director, said. "But a small group of carbon fat-cat companies are trying to stop this, in spite of making billions from a windfall of free pollution permits."
The steelmaker ArcelorMittal leads the list of companies in the report, with a current surplus valued at €1.7bn, followed by Lafarge, the cement group.There are so many ways to game this racket, the collect-the-permits-and-move-the-plant scam is one of the more elementary approaches.
Tata Steel, in third place with a surplus valued at €393m, last month announced 1,500 job losses at its plants in Lincolnshire and Teesside, blaming emissions regulations as well as the economic downturn. Karl-Ulrich Köhler, chief executive of Tata Steel Europe, said at the time: "EU carbon legislation threatens to impose huge additional costs on the steel industry." Tata Steel declined to comment on the report....MORE
Here are Sandbag's Carbon Fat Cats 2011.
Tata's surly spokesman:
The elegant Lord Stern, he of the epynomous report and Vice-Chair of carbon trading advisor IDEAcarbon:
An unnamed pollutocrat from the European Commission's Directorate-General for Climate Action:
