Carbon Emissions Trading

[david96]

Carbon Emissions Trading is all in the news, and is being promoted heavily by politicians and business leaders.

What are TV members views? There must be a lot of money involved somewhere. Can anyone tell me how much a cubic meter of carbon or tonne is worth? Does one have to convert this to CO2 before it can be sold must it be liquified or converted to a solid?

Some say you will be able to trade carbon on the stock exchange in the near future.

[007]

Carbon Emissions Trading is all in the news, and is being promoted heavily by politicians and business leaders.

What are TV members views? There must be a lot of money involved somewhere. Can anyone tell me how much a cubic meter of carbon or tonne is worth? Does one have to convert this to CO2 before it can be sold must it be liquified or converted to a solid?

Some say you will be able to trade carbon on the stock exchange in the near future.

Why don't you do a Google search? It's all about a country's (UN-??) assigned Carbon Emissions Quota, which is sometimes used, sometimes not, e.g. a country like Bhutan which can hardly use its carbon emissions quota due to lack of industry, etc. can sell its quota (or part of it) to countries that rapidly industrialise and easily "fill" their quota, e.g. China or India.

[soundman]

Definately a scam based on the lack of any real knowledge, speculation, uncertainty & hyperbol surrounding the myth of global warming.

Unforunately due to the ill-informed, brainwashed, highly vocal minority, carbon credit scams will be with us until the myth can be proved or dis-proved.

Soundman.

[PattayaParent]

As 007 states carbon credits can be bought by the abusers from countries that don't have any carbon emission issues giving them no incentive to reduce their carbon emissions.

So definitely a scam dreamt up by the abusers to give themselves some credibility.

[GuestHouse]

Of couse its always easier to asume a scam when the truth is a little more complex than you care to get a grip of.

There are many first rate carbon trading schemes which, for example, provide free or subsidized low carbon emmission energy generation/use technology in the devloping world - These range from examples of methane powered electricity generation plants, to low energy lighting dished out free in the developing world.

Not just reducing carbon emission but also providing cheap, non imported energy in the developing world and more efficient use of energy, reducing costs for people who really apreciate the help.

Other examples of carbon trading feed funding into developing and implementing low carbon technology that we all of us benefit from.

Are there scams? Of course there are, but Carbon trading puts a price on polution and that is in the end a good thing.

[lannarebirth]

Scam or not, there will be fees associated with making a market and trading of credits. And really, that's what it's really all about anyway, right?

[naka]

The usual culprits (countries) will be trying to get a few dollars out of it.

Naka.

[david96]

The Olympic Games is a classic example of waste of energy. How much energy was used in the last 8 years creating this function in China? Just for a sporting event run for political purposes for 17 days or so. To be repeated every 4 years in another country.There are many more.

A modern day international "bread and circuses" as an opiate for the masses. Energy, materials and labour could be put to more useful purposes such as basic housing, health and education.Once one spends time on excessive entertainment over constructive and useful work we will finish up like the Roman Empire.

Of course such projects are "exempt" from the effects of "carbon emmissions".

[LaoPo]

Carbon Emissions Trading is all in the news, and is being promoted heavily by politicians and business leaders.

What are TV members views? There must be a lot of money involved somewhere. Can anyone tell me how much a cubic meter of carbon or tonne is worth? Does one have to convert this to CO2 before it can be sold must it be liquified or converted to a solid?

Some say you will be able to trade carbon on the stock exchange in the near future.

I received a warning letter yesterday which included a so called "Cold Calling" Investors Alert warning and a list from Japan, warning about many scam companies:

This is one of them on the far bottom of the list/link: Asian Carbon Trade Exchange it's a scam since this 'exchange' doesn't exist !

Link:

http://www.fsa.go.jp/en/refer/cold/index.html

In the same warning letter they warned -just as an example- about a very impressive-looking company with offices in Japan and Manila.It appeared that this 'worldwide' company, with many important looking staff-members with high degrees from US, UK and Korean (?) universities, registered their website from an obscure address in a small village in The Netherlands. However, there is NO address in their website in The Netherlands nor a Dutch name, whatsoever.

They are mailing and phoning people to try and persuade them to invest with them.....bye-bye money if someone does.

Another example was, lately, a VERY wide published company called "Palm Invest dot com". They were daily on the news, expensive shows, daily television ads etc. etc. They collected between € 25-30 Million promising sky high results, investing in real estate in Dubai.

The owners drove Bentleys, Ferrari's and bought € 2 Million+ villa's.

They're in jail now, awaiting their trial.

LaoPo

[backflip]

"Can anyone tell me how much a cubic meter of carbon or tonne is worth? Does one have to convert this to CO2 before it can be sold must it be liquified or converted to a solid?"

Your questions make it very clear that you do not understand the fundamental concept behind carbon emissions trading. As another poster suggested, you should do some reading.

[MrPaddy]

What I find most absurd about it is that a country can trade its current emissions or increased emissions against a natural resource which is already there. So please tell me where the benefit is ?

For example, as mentioned Bhutan, a country with little emissions and possibly lots of natural forests. Not sure if Bhutan has lots of forests, but this is irrelevant as you can swap this for any country with plenty of natural jungles and forests, PNG, Indonesia, Borneo, South America etc etc.

So these forests exist today and were here 10 years ago, 20, 30 years ago and so on. If they are crediting the emissions of another country against it, what benefit does it have when it already existed.

The credits should be against new forests, new plantations, increased areas of natural forests etc and also credited against renewable energy resources and other such projects to reduce emissions altogether. They are doing this as well and that is heading in the right direction, but doing it against already existing areas is just pulling wool over your eyes and making someone feel good.

Here is another example, a large farm in a country recently, 2007, sold for 80 million dollars to an American company solely for the offset of its emissions, they intend to never touch a plant that is on it and let it become their carbon sink/bank whatever it is called.

My argument is that this property already existed and was doing its job without the American company coming along. So where is the advantage here ?

I too would be very interested to know how to calculate the footprint of a household or person etc. Say how many trees of what type and age does it require to offset a normal household. Presumably different trees have different conversion ratios and the age of the tree would definitely effect the production.

[david96]

Academic cool on warming

April 09, 2008

RESPECTED academic Don Aitkin has seen the ugly side of the climate change debate after being warned he faced demonisation if he challenged the accepted wisdom that global warming poses a danger to humanity.

Professor Aitkin told The Australian yesterday he had been told he was "out of his mind" by some in the media after writing that the science of global warming "doesn't seem to stack up".

Declaring global warming might not be such an important issue, Professor Aitkin argued in a speech to the Planning Insitute of Australia this month that counter measures such as carbon trading were likely to be unnecessary, expensive and futile without stronger evidence of a crisis.

The eminent historian and political scientist said in a speech called A Cool Look at Global Warming, which has received little public attention, that he was urged not to express his contrary views to orthodox thinking because he would be demonised.

He says critics who question the impact of global warming are commonly ignored or attacked because "scientist activists" from a quasi-religious movement have spread a flawed message that "the science is settled" and "the debate is over".

Professor Aitkin is a former vice-chancellor at the University of Canberra, foundation chairman of the Australian Research Council and a distinguished researcher at the Australian National University and Macquarie University.

Although not a scientist, he has brought his critical approach as an experienced academic accustomed to testing theories to a debate he says so far lacks clear evidence.

Professor Aitkin's speech cast strong doubt on the Rudd Government's plan to impose significant limits on carbon emissions as the key to combating climate change, while the developing economies of China and India become the world's biggest polluters. "I doubt the proposed extraordinary policies will actually happen," he said. "China and India will not reduce their own use of carbon."

According to Professor Aitkin, attempts to set carbon-use levels in Europe, to be emulated by Australia, have been laughable because of absurd errors involved in allocating quotas and the potential for fraud. He believes carbon trading will lead to rorts, and that the "bubble will burst" on enthusiasm for urgently containing the carbon-producing effects of burning coal and oil.

The story of the human impact on climate change, which Professor Aitkin calls Anthropogenic Global Warming, "doesn't seem to stack up as the best science", according to his own research.

Despite thousands of scientists allegedly having "consensus" on global warming, he says there is an absence of convincing data: "Put simply, despite all the hype and models and the catastrophic predictions, it seems to me that we human beings barely understand 'climate'. It is too vast a domain."

Much of the evidence of global warming, he says, is based on computer modelling that does not take account of variables, and does not cover the whole planet.

Professor Aitkin calls himself a global warming "agnostic", and his comments are a direct challenge to the orthodoxy successfully promoted by influential figures such as former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery, whose scientific expertise is paleontology, despite his popular writings on climate change.

The basis of the Kyoto Protocol, signed by the Rudd Government, is unvalidated models that cannot provide evidence of anything, Professor Aitkin argues. But he says the Rudd Government is among policy-makers trapped, willingly or unwillingly, by the world view of climate change campaigners who take a "quasi-religious view" that the dangers of global warming cannot be doubted.

Professor Aitkin told The Australian last night that Kevin Rudd's climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut, was "a captive" because of the riding instructions he had been given to provide solutions that accepted global warming as fact.

In his speech, he says: "The hard-heads may not buy the story, but they do want to be elected or re-elected.

"Democratic governments facing elections are sensitive to popular movements that could have an electoral effect. I am sure that it was this electoral perception that caused the Howard government at the end to move significantly towards Kyoto and indicate a preparedness to go down the Kyoto path, as indeed the Labor Party had done earlier, and Kevin Rudd did as soon as he was elected."

Professor Aitkin says the earth's atmosphere may be warming but, if so, not by much and not in an alarming and unprecedented way.

"It is possible that the warming has a 'significant human influence', to use the (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's) term, and I do not dismiss the possibility.

"But there are other powerful possible causes that have nothing to do with us."

He says an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide over the past century is agreed, some of it due to fossil fuels, cement-making and agriculture. However, normal production of CO2 is not known, and it makes up only a tiny part of the atmosphere. "How does a small increase in a very small component have such a large apparent effect? The truth is that no one has yet shown that itdoes."

According to the professor, much of the inadequate policy-making on climate change is based on "over-certainty in the absence of convincing argument and data" and "over-reliance on computer models".

"While governments can never ignore what they see as popular feeling, good policy cannot be based on moods," he says.

[teatree]

It's ALL a big scam. There is a very clear agenda with its sight set firmly on tax, amongst other things..

Just look at the facts

Billions is spent on global warming research, polar bears are tracked, bird's migrating patterns are studied and the media talks about the whole thing CONSTANTLY.

But how much funding has the guy who has created energy out of water ever got? NOTHING

Or the company that has invented a car powered by high pressured air? NOTHING

Surely an energy source that produced little or no carbon would be what the global warming movement wants right? No, the governments don't want us to stop using oil, they just want to be able to tax and control us even more.

[MrPaddy]

So you saw that show the other night also ??

Also one thing to think about....right now we have this crisis, the world over, all things and experts point to this as a factual disaster.

Think about the last time we had a very similar scenario where world disaster was predicted........Y2K

And look what happened....big ben kept on tickin

Edited April 9, 2008 by MrPaddy

[teatree]

The climate has been much hotter and much colder than it is now. Its all part of a natural cycle that is driven by the Sun. The recent warming is nothing unusual when compared to other periods of time.

AND...it is shown in the ice core records that temperature increase PRECEDES co2 increase, by several hundred years. Why didn't Gore mention that in his film? Would have F*****d up his argument, that's why.

[MrPaddy]

The thing is that it is all happening so much quicker now.

Honestly, the pollutions put out there and the amounts have to have an effect.

How much of an effect I do not know.

Regardless, any attempt to reduce emissions can only be a good thing. Less means less pollution around the globe and that has to be a good thing. Nobody can argue that Bangkok would be a better place to live if it had half the pollution it does today.

[teatree]

The thing is that it is all happening so much quicker now.

Honestly, the pollutions put out there and the amounts have to have an effect.

How much of an effect I do not know.

Regardless, any attempt to reduce emissions can only be a good thing. Less means less pollution around the globe and that has to be a good thing. Nobody can argue that Bangkok would be a better place to live if it had half the pollution it does today.

No, the recent warming is nothing unusual when you compare it with what has happened in the past. Accurate temperature readings which go back thousands of years have been taken from ice cores and they show that there have been many instances of sudden spikes in temperature, both up and down.

Do you know that global temperatures have not increased for almost a decade? And actually, they have dipped slightly. This is a trend MANY scientists predict to continue - global cooling over the next few years due to decreased solar activity.

I would love BKK to be free of pollution. I want fresh air, I want clean water, I want to eat healthy food. BUT, if we jump on the current global warming bandwagon we are not going to get these things. What we ARE going to get is higher taxes, higher cost of living and more control over what each of us can do. Do you want a meter fixed to your car that charges you 10 baht per mile to drive ANYWHERE, not just in places like London?