UN climate chief urges governments to deliver on Cancun pledges
Christiana Figueres confirms first Green Climate Fund meeting will take place next month.
The UN's top climate change official has issued a timely call for governments to accelerate efforts to deliver on last year's Cancun Accords, ahead of the year's first official round of international climate negotiations in Bangkok next month.
Diplomats are scheduled to recommence negotiations at a meeting in Bangkok scheduled to run from April 3 to 8. The conference is intended to provide an update on progress against the Cancun Accords and agree a work-plan for this year's negotiations, which will culminate in December at the COP 17 summit in Durban, South Africa.
Kenya is better placed to emerge as a regional carbon emission trading hub.
The exchange is modelled after the Chicago and Australia carbon exchanges but several aspects of the two have been domesticated.
The exchange has put Kenya on the global map of advance in the trading of carbon credits and will trigger more investments in development of clean, efficient energy and afforestation projects.
EUAs hit fresh high as stronger euro drives CO2 up
Front-year carbon prices hit a fresh four-and-a-half month high of €15.85 on Friday as the sustained strength of the euro brought with it bullish sentiment amid higher energy prices.
Council tax payers in Reading could save money now Reading Borough Council has become the only local authority in Britain to benefit from £100,000 of funding to develop low-carbon heating.
Europe-funded energy programme GeoPower is working with governments, businesses and other organisations across the continent to encourage them to work together in partnership to introduce ground-source heat pumps.
The council has successfully bid to become the only partner in the UK to benefit and is one of 12 across eight countries – the UK, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Sweden, Estonia and Belgium.
The innovative low-carbon method uses constant heat which lies below the surface of the ground and captures, compresses and then distributes heat to buildings.
In the summer the process can be reversed so the heat can be taken from the building and put back into the grounds, achieving considerable carbon energy, energy and financial savings.
The low-carbon method of heating buildings has already been installed at school The Avenue Centre, a building at Prospect School in Tilehurst and some other council buildings in the borough.
RBC sustainability manager Ben Burfoot said: “This project gives us the opportunity to pave the way for using this technology in new and existing buildings in Reading, as well as enabling us to maximise the use of ground-source heat pumps nationally to provide the low-carbon heating systems of the future.”
In bidding for funding, RBC had to show it had some experience in renewable energy and was in a position to deliver its part of the project.
The council has set a target of reducing carbon emissions across the borough by 34 per cent by 2020 based on 1990 levels including halving its own output, and with a further aim of being carbon-free by 2050.
Over the next two years the council will play a leading role in the pioneering project that will eventually help cut carbon emissions across Britain and the continent.
RBC will work closely with the partnership to share technology and experiences of installing and using ground-source heat pumps.
The work will then be pulled together to set a plan for how more ground-source heat pumps could be installed across Europe and benefit from the Government’s new Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) set to be announced next year.
RHI is intended to provide long-term support for renewable heat technologies from household solar thermal panels to industrial wood-pellet boilers through an £850m investment plan.
Warren Swaine, lead councillor for environment and sustainability, said: “Winning this bid shows our council is prepared to take a lead in developing a sustainable future, not just for Reading but for the rest of the country.”
The government is seeking to tap billions of shillings from international carbon trading markets in a massive re-afforestation drive that will also create jobs for thousands of youths.
The plan involves rehabilitating degraded lands, 210 jua kali sheds and 200 hospitals through planting trees, grass, and flowers.
| Article information sourced From Businessdailyafrica |
California has approved an extensive carbon trading plan aimed at cutting greenhouse emissions.
State regulators passed a "cap-and-trade" framework to let companies buy and sell permits, giving them an incentive to emit fewer gases.
The aim is to create the second-largest market in the field, after Europe's.
State officials hope the scheme will be copied across the US, but opponents warn it may harm California's growth and lead to higher electricity prices.
California's Air Resources Board approved the new rules late on Thursday. They are part of a landmark state climate bill passed by the legislature in 2006, which set 1 January 2011 as the deadline for enacting a cap-and-trade system.
The scheme means that from 2012 California will allocate licences to pollute and create a market where they can be traded.
A company that emits fewer greenhouse gases than its permits allow, could sell the extra capacity to a dirtier firm.
By making over-polluting more expensive, the scheme aims to provide incentives to develop greener technology.
Over time the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions - the cap - is to be reduced. California wants to cut emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Costs
Although all firms will eventually need to buy greenhouse gas allowances, most of the permits will be given away in the first three-year period.
But many businesses fear they will suffer in an economy that is struggling to emerge from recession, the BBC's Rajesh Mirchandani in Los Angeles says.
Dorothy Rothrock of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association told Reuters news agency: "There are definitely going to be some costs incurred right up front for these companies."
Outgoing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger - who supports environmental causes - argues that growth in emerging green technologies will offset the costs of cap-and-trade.
"Since 2006 or so green jobs have been created 10 times faster than in any other sector," he said.
California - the world's eighth largest economy - already has strict climate-related regulations, including renewable energy mandates for utilities, and tough fuel-efficiency standards for cars.
Cancun Climate Change Conference agrees plan to cut carbon emissions
Delegates from193 countries agreed at Cancun to cut carbon emissions and help developing countries tackle climate change as part of an "historic" deal to help stop global warming.
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The sending, sorting and filtering of spam email alone accounts for 33bn units of electricity each year
Spam
The carbon footprint of spam:
0.3g CO2e: A spam email
4g CO2e: A proper email
50g CO2e: An email with long and tiresome attachment
Sending and receiving electronic message is never going to constitute the largest part of our carbon footprints. But the energy required to support our increasingly heaving and numerous inboxes does add up.
Very roughly speaking (remember that all complex carbon footprints are really best guesses), a typical year of incoming mail for a business user – including sending, filtering and reading – creates a carbon footprint of around 135kg. That's over 1% of of a relatively green 10-tonne lifestyle and equivalent to driving 200 miles in an average car.
According to research by McAfee, a remarkable 78% of all incoming emails are spam. Around 62 trillion spam messages are sent every year, requiring the use of 33bn kilowatt hours (KWh) of electricity and causing around 20 million tonnes of CO2e per year.
McAfee estimated that around 80% of this electricity is consumed by the reading and deleting of spam and the searching through spam folders to dig out genuine emails that ended up there by accident. Spam filters themselves account for 16%. The actual generation and sending of the spam is a very small proportion of the footprint.
Although 78% of incoming emails sent are spam, these messages account for just 22% of the total footprint of a typical email account because, although they are a pain, you deal with them quickly. Most of them you never even see. A genuine email has a bigger carbon footprint, simply because it takes time to deal with.
The average email has just one-sixtieth the footprint of a letter, according to a back-of-the-envelope comparison. That looks like a carbon saving unless you end up sending 60 times more emails than the number of letters you would have posted in days gone by. Lots of people do. This is a good example of the rebound effect – a low-carbon technology resulting in higher-carbon living simply because we use it more.
If the great quest is for ways in which we can improve our lives while cutting carbon, surely spam and unnecessary email have to be very high on the hitlist along with old-fashioned junk paper post. But what can be done?
Here's one radical idea: a tax of a penny or cent per message sent. Obviously this wouldn't be ideal from the perspective of digital access, and it might be impossible to implement. And no-one likes an extra tax. But it would surely kill all spam instantly. The funds could go to tackling world poverty, say, or to help unlock a global emissions deal by supporting adaptation and technology transfer payments. The world's carbon footprint would go down by a substantial 20 million tonnes even if genuine users didn't change their habits at all. The average user would be saved a couple of minutes of their time every day and an annual fund of up to £170bn would be made available.
What's the carbon footprint of ... building a house
New homes require far less energy to run than older properties, but building them generates plenty of CO2
• New houses such as these ones in south Derbyshire take lots of energy and resources to produce. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA
The carbon footprint of a house:
80 tonnes CO2e: A newbuild two-bed cottage
The carbon footprint of building a house depends on all kinds of things – including, of course, the size of the house and the types of materials chosen.
The estimate of 80 tonnes given above is for the construction of a brand-new cottage with two bedrooms upstairs and two reception rooms and a kitchen downstairs. It's based on a study that I was involved in for Historic Scotland. The study looked at the climate change implications of various options for a traditional cottage in Dumfries: leave it as it is, refurbish, or knock it down and build a new one to various different building codes. We looked at the climate change impact over a 100-year period, taking into account the embodied emissions in the construction and maintenance as well as the energy used and generated by those living in the building.
Unsurprisingly, the worst option by far was to do nothing and leave the old house leaking energy like a sieve. Knocking down and starting again worked out at about 80 tonnes CO2e whether the house was built to 2008 Scottish building regulations or to the much more stringent and expensive Code for Sustainable Homes Level 5 that demanded 'carbon neutrality'.
Here's how that total broke down for the carbon-neutral option:
Eighty tonnes is a lot – equivalent to five brand-new family cars, about six years of living for the average Brit or 24 economy-class trips to Hong Kong from London. But a house may last for a century or more, so the annual carbon cost is much less – and for all the new-build options, the up-front emissions from construction work were paid back by savings from better energy efficiency in 15–20 years.
However, the winning option was to refurbish the old house, because the carbon investment of doing this was just eight tonnes CO2e, and even the highest-specification newbuild could not catch up this advantage over the 100-year period. Once cost was taken into account, refurbishment became dramatically the most practical and attractive option, too.
If this one study is representative, the message for the construction industry is clear. Investment in the very highest levels of energy-efficiency for new homes is, even at its best, an extremely costly way of saving carbon. Investing in improvements to existing homes is dramatically more cost-effective.
• This article draws on text from How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee
By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News, Portland
Whales store carbon by the tonne
A century of whaling may have released more than 100 million tonnes - or a large forest's worth - of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists say.
Whales store carbon within their huge bodies and when they are killed, much of this carbon can be released. US scientists revealed their estimate of carbon released by whaling at a major ocean sciences meeting in the US.
Dr Andrew Pershing from the University of Maine described whales as the "forests of the ocean".
Dr Pershing and his colleagues from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute calculated the annual carbon-storing capacity of whales as they grew.
"Whales, like any animal or plant on the planet, are made out of a lot of carbon," he said.
"And when you kill and remove a whale from the ocean, that's removing carbon from this storage system and possibly sending it into the atmosphere."
He pointed out that, particularly in the early days of whaling, the animals were a source of lamp oil, which was burned, releasing the carbon directly into the air.
"And this marine system is unique because when whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean.
"If they die where it's deep enough, it will be [stored] out of the atmosphere perhaps for hundreds of years."
Ocean trees
In their initial calculations, the team worked out that 100 years of whaling had released an amount of carbon equivalent to burning 130,000 sq km of temperate forests, or to driving 128,000 Humvees continuously for 100 years.
The idea would be to do a full accounting of how much carbon you could store in a fully populated stock of fish or whales
Dr Pershing stressed that this was still a relatively tiny amount when compared to the billions of tonnes produced by human activity every year.
But he said that whales played an important role in storing and transporting carbon in the marine ecosystem.
Simply leaving large groups of whales to grow, he said, could "sequester" the greenhouse gas, in amounts that were comparable to some of the reforestation schemes that earn and sell carbon credits.
He suggested that a similar system of carbon credits could be applied to whales in order to protect and rebuild their stocks.
"The idea would be to do a full accounting of how much carbon you could store in a fully populated stock of fish or whales, and allow countries to sell their fish quota as carbon credits," he explained.
"You could use those credits as an incentive to reduce the fishing pressure or to promote the conservation of some of these species."
Is bigger better?
Other scientists said that he had raised an exciting and interesting problem.
Professor Daniel Costa, a marine animal researcher from the University of California, Santa Cruz, told BBC News: "So many more groups are looking at the importance of these large animals in the carbon cycle.
"And it's one of those things that, when you look at it, you think: ' This is so obvious, why didn't we think of this before?'."
Dr Pershing pointed out that whales, with their huge size, were more efficient than smaller animals at storing carbon.
He used the analogy of a small dog compared to a large dog.
"My wife's 6lb (2.7kg) toy poodle eats one cup of food per day and my dog - a 60lb standard poodle - eats five cups of food per day," he said.
"That's only five times as much food but my dog weighs ten times as much."
He said that the marine carbon credit idea could be applied to other very large marine animals, including endangered bluefin tuna and white sharks.
Dr Pershing said: "These are huge and they are top predators, so unless they're fished they would be likely to take their biomass to the bottom of the ocean [when they die]."
The American Geophysical Union's Ocean Sciences meeting has been taking place this week in Portland, Oregon
Some governments give "huge subsidies" to oil and gas production, said Mr Sukhdev
20 October 2010Last updated at 16:05 GMT
India and Brazil head move to 'green' economic future
By Richard BlackEnvironment correspondent, BBC News, Nagoya
A number of countries have systems in place to reward forest conservation
Governments are increasingly taking the economic value of nature into account in policy-making, with growing interest in results from a UN-backed analysis.
The Brazilian and Indian governments are among those keen to use findings from The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb) project.
Final results from the three-year study were unveiled here at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meeting.
Nature's services must be counted if they are to be valued, its leader said.
Pavan Sukhdev, a Deutsche Bank capital markets expert who leads Teeb on secondment to the UN Environment Programme (Unep), said that if society did not properly account for services that nature provides, they would be lost.
In an earlier analysis, Teeb calculated that the economic value of services being lost - including water purification, pollination of crops and climate regulation - amounts to $2-5 trillion dollars per year, with the poor hardest hit.
Here, Mr Sukhdev and his team concentrated on ideas for implementation - how to turn the findings of the study into real politics.
And the first thing for governments to do, he said, was to carry out national equivalents of the global Teeb study - to analyse the real value of ecosystem services to their economies.
"Conventional methods of accounting such as GDP accounting will not capture them - so we need... to rapidly upgrade the system of national accounts," he said.
"You cannot manage what you do not measure." Global uptake Mr Sukhdev said that so far, 27 governments from Africa and Latin America, and one from Asia, had approached the Unep team for help in "greening" their economies.
Many of these are looking to translate the global Teeb findings findings into their national context, with Brazil and India in the vanguard.
India's Minister for Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh, said his country was planning a national economic assessment along Teeb lines.
"We are committed to developing a framework for green national accounts that we can implement by 2015, and we are confident that the 'Teeb for India' study will be the key facilitator," he said.
And Braulio Dias, secretary for biodiversity and forests in Brazil's Environment Ministry, said his country was also looking to Teeb for a change of direction - in fact, without the pending election, it might be happening already.
"The tradition of many countries including Brazil has been one of utilising regulation - command and control instruments - and we need to work more on incentive measures and get the different sectors on board," he told BBC News.
"The Teeb approach is very useful to make them understand the implications of loss of biodiversity, and also the return on investment in terms of biodiversity conservation.
"We have several bills before the national congress to establish a national mechanism for payment for ecosystem services - if they're approved, I think we will have a better possibility of implement some of those economic measures."
Collectively, $650bn of subsidies for oil and gas?”
End QuotePavan SukhdevDeutsche Bank
But he echoed the concerns of many other developing countries by emphasising that some kind of international payment system, transferring money from the West to the rest for conserving resources, might be needed in the long run.
The European Union also supports the Teeb principles, with many countries and the EU itself set to examine the potential for greening their economies along Teeb lines.
"Teeb can have the same impact for biodiversity as the Stern Review had for climate change, and will be a useful tool to help reduce the loss of species and habitats," said UK Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman.
"The UK Government has been a major supporter of Teeb since it started and we will be funding the roll out of the report across the world to communicate the central message that, economically, we have to take action to reduce the loss of our natural environment before the cost becomes too high." Politics of conservation While a number of countries including Brazil and India do have systems in place to reward forest conservation, implementing the full Teeb vision would amount to a root and branch overhaul of economic incentives and taxes.
But some moves could and should be quickly made, said Pavan Sukhdev.
The first thing was to "flatten the footbal field", which currently sees huge subsidies given to oil and gas production - largely in richer countries.
"Collectively, $650bn of subsidies for oil and gas?
"Surely, this is not a Mother Theresa business - it is not a charity - it doesn't need subsidy," he told BBC News.
"I would like governments to look at and start disclosing their subsidies, and gradually work to reduce them and indeed eliminate them; because if want businesses to arise which have a better footprint and a lower cost to society, the first thing you have to do is to stop favouring those that don't."
The draft agreement from this CBD meeting would see countries agreeing to incorporate biodiversity values into their national accounting by 2020, and eliminating by the same date subsidies that are detrimental to biodiversity.
But many nations are holding to the point, in negotiations, that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed"; and although many developing countries support the Teeb concept, factional politics could yet prevent the endorsement of such a vision here.
original news source:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11588020
Coalition hits big business with stealth carbon tax
DECC announces that CRC will no longer return revenue to participants
The government today quietly imposed a £1bn-a-year carbon tax on around 4,000 of the largest businesses and public sector bodies in the UK as part of its spending review.
The move was not announced as part of chancellor George Osborne's speech to parliament. Instead, it was left to a statement by the Department of Energy and Climate Change in which it detailed its spending review settlement and confirmed the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) would be reformed so that the Treasury keeps revenue raised through the carbon pricing scheme.
"Revenue raised from the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme will be used to support the public finances (including spending on the environment), rather than recycled to participants," the statement said.
The spending review document confirmed that the move would raise £1bn by 2014/15 to help tackle the deficit.
Under the CRC, companies and public sector bodies that use over 6,000MWh of electricity a year have to participate in the scheme and purchase carbon allowances in line with the amount of energy they use each year.
During the initial phase of the scheme carbon allowances will be priced at £13 for each tonne of carbon that the company is calculated to be responsible for.
The government had intended to "recycle" the revenue raised from the sale of allowances to those organisations participating in the scheme. The level of recycled payments would be determined by the organisation's performance in an energy efficiency league table, with the best performers receiving all the money they spent on allowances plus a bonus and the worst performers receiving only some of the money back.
However, the government has now effectively turned the sale of allowances into a carbon tax, forcing all participants to purchase carbon allowances based on how much energy they use.
The move is likely to be welcomed by environmental groups and some green businesses that have long maintained that the CRC would not have a big enough impact on organisations' energy costs to drive significant improvements in energy efficiency.
It is also in line with the coalition's commitment to increase green taxes.
However, it is bound to be fiercely opposed by some business groups who have already argued that the CRC is too costly and burdensome and will now find them faced with a major hike in energy bills.
Chris Huhne is today expected to provide fresh details on how the coalition government will impose a 'floor price' on carbon emissions designed to bolster the economic case for low carbon renewable, nuclear and carbon capture and storage projects.The Energy and Climate Change Secretary will unveil the government's first National Policy Statement on Energy at an event at Hinkley Point nuclear power station, in a move that is expected to provide further clarity on a wide-range of the government's energy policies.In particular, the statement will include details on how the government plans to make good on its coalition agreement pledge to provide a stable 'floor price' for carbon that would provide low carbon investors greater certainty.Investors in new nuclear plants and CCS projects have been waiting anxiously to find out what level the carbon floor price will be set at and how it will be imposed.According to industry insiders the carbon price will have to reach around 80 a tonne to make it possible for new nuclear reactors to compete economically with coal-fired power plants. However, the price of carbon under the EU emissions trading scheme has been hovering below 15 a tonne for much of the past year and it remains to be seen how the British government will move to impose a floor price when the current price is delivered through the EU-wide carbon market.It is also unclear if the government will announce the precise floor price it intends to impose or when it plans to bring the floor price into effect, particularly given that any significant increase will lead to a hke in energy bills.The Sunday Times reported yesterday that one option being considered by the Department of Energy and Climate Change was to introduce a lower floor price over the next two years, which would then be increased gradually over the next decade as new nuclear plants and CCS projects come online.Energy investors, including leading utilities such as EDF, RWE and E.ON who are all working on plans for new nuclear reactors, have been growing increasingly frustrated over the lack of clarity around the proposed floor price and will be hoping that today's announcement gives them the certainty they need to move forward with their plans.The Sunday Times also reported that the government will confirm that it will not back plans for a large scale tidal barrage across the Severn Estuary.Developers have argued since the seventies that such a barrage could provide up to five per cent of the UK's electricity, but reports earlier this summer suggested the coalition is opposed to the project on the ground of the estimated 33bn price tag and fears it will danage the estuary's natural habitat.However, the policy statement is expected to confirm that smaller tidal energy projects that could be built in the estuary without government subsidy could still get the go-ahead. According to reports, two consortia are continuing to work on plans for tidal turbine systems, one involving Rolls Royce and Atkins and the other featuring Halcrow, Arup and KPMG. Government today expected to provide some much needed clarity with release of National Policy Statement on Energy
Who’s buying credits? The potential market for carbon credits is huge. Under the Kyoto Protocol, not just companies but governments are forced to offset their emissions. Even outside of the agreement, many companies are buying up credits to help their corporate image and to encourage their customers to go green. British Airways have offered their customers the ability to purchase credits for a number of years to offset their flight. The Westin resort and Spa group offer their customers carbon credits to offset their stay, and have reduced 800 tonnes of CO2 to date. The Swedish energy group Vattenfall is the largest single buyer of credits in Europe, followed by a Polish energy group. Overall, European groups are spending £800 million on carbon credits. Last year, Spain announced that in order to fulfil the Kyoto Protocol, it would be purchasing 6 million tonnes of carbon credits, and is calculating that it will need to spend The prices of the credits themselves vary and can be volatile, creating the potential for large gains as demand grows. As of the 30th September 2010, CER spot prices were €1.2 billion overall to comply. Most countries are spending similar amounts or more. And in the voluntary and over the counter (OTC) markets 94 million tonnes of CO2 were traded last year, with market participants predicting that over 1 billion tonnes per annum will be traded by 2020. €13.56 and EUA spot prices €15.60 as traded through the exchanges. Running alongside this are the OTC markets, where one of the largest companies charge £15.49 per credit, ranging to £10.90 for each credit from another supplier. British Airways charge approximately £11.70 for each tonne offset on one of their flights.
CO2 Risk Tool May Spur UN Carbon Trade, IDEAcarbon
By Catherine Airlie - Oct 15, 2010 Source Bloomberg
IDEAglobal, a research company advised by economist Nicholas Stern, has started selling software that predicts prices of United Nations carbon credits and may spur trading and investment in emissions reduction.
The Carbon Rating Agency, part of the company’s IDEAcarbon unit, said its CARBONrisk software helps bring financial risk management tools to the carbon market, according to an e-mailed statement today. The software predicts supply and future prices of credits by analyzing the likelihood that emissions reduction projects will be awarded with tradable credits.
“The carbon markets significantly lag the established financial markets in their ability to generate and deploy the funding deemed necessary to address the effects of climate change,” IDEAcarbon Chairman Ian Johnson said in the statement.
Tradable UN carbon credits are awarded under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism to projects in developing nations that reduce the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
There has been a “general lack of liquidity,” IDEAcarbon said. The software will help to manage “delivery risk” of carbon credits to forecast a price and help attract investment into CDM projects, according to the statement.
UN emission credits for delivery in December lost 0.9 percent to 13.70 euros ($19.26) a metric ton on the European Climate Exchange in London. About 1 tons of December credits were traded yesterday on the exchange. That’s about 13 percent of trading in the equivalent European Union carbon permits.
Author: Phillip Coorey link source at foot of article.
THE government will push its case for a price on carbon further today with a report that finds ambitious cuts in energy use will be more easily achieved if done in conjunction with an emissions trading scheme or carbon tax.
The report by the prime minister's taskforce was handed to the cabinet in July and recommends Australia adopt a target of a 30 per cent increase in energy efficiency by 2020.
It contains such recommendations as cleaner vehicles, greener building codes, greater energy efficiency standards and disclosure requirements, and encouraging power generators to help their customers use less energy
It claims that through reduced energy and lower energy costs, a household could shave $296 a year off its energy bill in 2020.
While the 30 per cent reduction target could be achieved if the many recommendations were adopted, the report states that a price on carbon would facilitate the process.
''By far, the most important element in a vision of a step change in Australia's energy efficiency improvement is the presence of an explicit price on carbon,'' it says. ''An explicit carbon price will underpin and catalyse energy efficiency throughout the economy, greatly enhancing the effectiveness of proposals in this report.''
The report's release follows yesterday's inaugural meeting of the multi-party climate change committee, which the government put together to develop a policy for putting a price on carbon. As previously flagged, the much-derided citizens' assembly, a Labor election promise designed to build a community consensus for a carbon price, was put to the sword.
Its role will be supplanted by a Climate Change Commission, which will conduct forums across the nation ''to promote greater understanding of climate change''.
Julia Gillard also announced that the committee will release a communique after each meeting, as well as periodic information, after being criticised for the secrecy of its hearings. It will meet monthly for at least a year.
The energy efficiency report's recommendations on transport include supporting a global goal to make cars 50 per cent more fuel efficient by 2050, introducing mandatory carbon dioxide emissions for light vehicles, and changing the fringe benefit tax treatment of leased vehicles.
It supports adopting the Henry tax review recommendation to replace the FBT formula, which provides an incentive to drive, with a flat tax rate of 20 per cent independent of distance driven.
The Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet, said the energy efficiency measures would be considered as part of the government's overall approach to climate change, but its priority remained a carbon price.
The energy efficiency report says efficiency measures alone will not enable Australia to reach its target of reducing carbon emissions by 5 per cent by 2020.
''Energy efficiency policy is an important part of a suite of responses to climate change but it cannot realistically be expected to do the heavy lifting needed to deliver Australia's greenhouse gas reduction targets,'' it says.
''The introduction of a broad-based carbon price is the only practical way that Australia can guarantee that its greenhouse gas emissions will stop growing and begin to decrease.''
The Prime Minister returned from overseas to chair the committee, comprised of government members, Greens and independents. The Coalition has refused to join because the prerequisite is advocacy of a price on carbon.
The opposition climate action spokesman, Greg Hunt, dismissed the exercise yesterday as the ''electricity tax committee''.
He said the dumping of the citizens' assembly was a humiliation for Ms Gillard and rivalled her broken promise not to introduce a carbon tax, which is one mechanism for putting a price on carbon, along with an ETS, and which is back on the table.
The former prime minister Kevin Rudd commissioned a taskforce to undertake the report in November last year as a consequence of negotiations with Malcolm Turnbull over the emissions trading scheme.
After the government panicked in April and shelved the ETS, Mr Rudd elevated the as-yet uncompleted report's status as the government's key response to greenhouse gas reduction.
Source:
Author: Phillip Coorey CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
October 8, 2010
A file photo shows power lines and pylons standing in the darkening sky near Cologne. Photographer: Wolfgang von Brauchitsch/Bloomberg
A file photo shows smokestacks and cooling towers emiting smoke and water vapor at the E.ON-owned Scholven coal-powered electricity plant near Gelsenkirchen, Germany. Photographer: Wolfgang von Brauchitsch/Bloomberg
The price of polluting jumped 15 percent in Europe this month, the biggest gain in a year, as utilities including E.ON AG amass carbon credits and regulators restrict future supplies.
E.ON, the largest power producer in Germany, needs European Union carbon futures now for generation in 2013 and beyond. It’s purchasing United Nations credits, a less-expensive alternative for complying with EU caps, to “minimize its exposure,” said Eliano Russo, E.ON’s head of carbon supply.
Europe designed the world’s biggest cap-and-trade program to limit greenhouse gases by doling out fewer allowances each year through 2020. While an unforeseen recession derailed plans set before 2008 to create a shortage of permits, an economic rebound and EU squeeze on allocations for phase three, starting in 2013, has utilities scrambling for longer-dated futures.
“The market is long today but will definitely be short in the future,” Russo said in an interview. “Whatever happens at the global level, the EU emissions trading system will be in place until at least 2020.”
Carbon futures for delivery this December traded today on London’s European Climate Exchange at 14.66 euros ($19.64) a ton, near their highest since December 2009. The contract so far this month is up four times as much as oil’s 3.5 percent gain.
E.ON, which hedges about 40 percent of its electricity three years before it’s delivered, said in a regulatory submission last year that emitters will probably spend about 24 billion euros annually on carbon auctions starting in 2012.
Near-Term Glut
The Dusseldorf-based utility, with 150 million euros budgeted to curb greenhouse gases in developing countries, is applying its European technology to cut emissions from rubbish dumps in Vietnam and China and power stations in Indonesia.
E.ON is among investors shifting their focus from a near- term glut of permits to a likely shortage after 2012. Carbon contracts outstanding for 2012 delivery jumped 10 percent in the past month to a record 165,532 contracts, 2.7 percent more than open interest for the 2010 benchmark, according to ECX data.
The concentration of longer-dated carbon contracts stands in contrast to the oil market, where traders have four times as many bets on 2010 contracts as they do for December 2012, according to New York Mercantile Exchange figures. What’s more, open interest in CO2 exceeds that of oil for the December 2012 contract.
Immediate Auctions
The EU regulator is resisting a call from utilities to schedule immediate auctions for CO2 permits valid from 2013 and beyond, said Mark Lewis, a Paris-based analyst for Deutsche Bank AG. Without those futures, utilities are forced to buy current allowances, he said. Generators generally sell power forward only when they can also buy fuel and carbon allowances to lock in the profit.
EU carbon prices may rise to 30 euros a ton in 2012 if the regulator sells significantly less than about 600 million tons in “early” auctions, Trevor Sikorski, a London-based analyst at Barclays Capital, forecast yesterday in an e-mailed note.
About 11,000 factories and power stations are in the EU program. Emitters with spare permits can sell them, while those that exceed their allocations can buy them on the open market or at auction. The knowledge that supplies will shrink as the EU distributes fewer allowances going forward is spurring demand for carbon now, said Laurent Segalen, the London-based head of commodities and environment at Nomura Holdings Inc.’s international unit.
“Emitters with surplus allowances seem unwilling to sell them at current price, while utilities are buying,” Segalen said. “All this is a correct configuration for a bullish market, which can go toward 20 euros.”
Insufficient
Utilities are concerned “there may not be a sufficient number of EU allowances to cover utilities’ needs to hedge for the years after 2012,” E.ON Energy Trading AG spokesman Jamee Majid said by e-mail on April 19.
The carbon price rebound from as low as 12.41 euros in January comes even as cap-and-trade stagnates outside Europe. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates the global carbon market will be valued at $1 trillion by 2020, 28 percent less than previously forecast, as the U.S. Senate jettisons a House proposal to cap and trade emissions from oil refineries and most factories.
“Cap-and-trade by definition is dead,” NRG Energy Inc. Chief Executive Officer David Crane said in a March 4 interview. The comments from the Texas power producer echoed similar words from Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican working with Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry and Connecticut independent Joseph Lieberman on the Senate energy bill.
‘Work in Progress’
While the bill is “a work in progress,” it likely will include a cap-and-trade system only for utilities, Graham told reporters in Washington on March 26. The senators are scheduled to unveil the bill on April 26.
In Europe, carbon markets had to overcome recession, regulatory missteps and the failure of global climate talks. In one of the most recent setbacks, the EU had to revise its rules after Hungary sold “recycled” permits that had already been counted once before in Europe, halting spot trading on the BlueNext SA carbon exchange in Paris for three days last month.
Carbon markets also sagged after last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen. UN envoys there failed to extend the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, whose current targets expire in 2012.
“We were on the cardiac table,” Brett Genus, a London- based carbon broker for Evolution Markets Inc. said April 15 by phone. “Now we’ve got a heart beat again.”
Pending tax breaks will spur industry EDF Trading, one of the world's top three carbon credit buyers, is considering up to six more projects in Thailand for next year in addition to 10 projects in which it already signed contractual purchasing agreements.
EDF's portfolio in Thailand includes clean development mechanism (CDM) projects in biomass, biogas from waste water, landfill gas capturing, and wind farms.
"We expect to have five to six more projects in Thailand next year with projects under discussion including a waste heat generator (WHG), biomass and energy efficiency projects," said Suchai Lertpichet, a representative of EDF in Thailand.
Siam Cement Group would partner in the WHG project.
EDF is a unit of Electricite de France, the largest power utility in Europe with installed capacity of 129,000 megawatts, and EDF has more than 110 CDM projects.
CDM is the mechanism that allows industrialised nations to buy carbon credits from projects in developing countries to meet their emission reduction commitments under the Kyoto Protocol by 2012. Carbon credits are used in emission trading schemes globally in the form of certified emission reduction (CER) certificates.
"The sector is going to get a boost from a coming tax incentive for carbon credit revenue granted by the Finance Ministry," said Mr Suchai.
The 7.7-megawatt Decha Bio Greens biomass project in Suphan Buri, one of the projects signed with EDF, is in the verification process and expects to get CER issuance at the beginning of next year.
CER prices have increased since the beginning of this year and are now quoted at 13.89.
EDF executives attended a renewable energy forum yesterday called France Green Tech in which a number of companies expressed keen interest in investing in Thailand.
MPO, the European leader in optical disks, cited Thailand as a promising investment location for its new photovoltaic (PV) cell business outside France.
The company has spent 24 million on research and development of its innovative PV20 which it says can lower emissions by 20%. It spent another 45 million to develop a manufacturing plant of PV20 silicon wafers in France with the first phase coming onstream in 2011, said MPO chairman Loic de Poix.
"Thailand is very attractive for our investment given the country's high consumption of electricity with no (definite) nuclear programme in place," he said.
MPO's suggested PV investment in Thailand would require roughly 15 million. The company has produced optical disks in Thailand for 16 years.
Credits to source:
Published: 13/10/2010 at 12:00 AM by bangkokpost.com
Almost 2,800 public and private sector organisations have registered for the government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment emissions trading scheme, and a further 400 are going through the process, it was announced today.
By David Williams
Separate figures for the public sector are expected on Monday. However, John Maddocks, CIPFA’s policy manager for sustainability, told Public Finance that early indications showed a strong take-up by local authorities. He said more than 90% of those expected to join had signed up a few days before last night’s deadline.
‘It’s pretty good going,’ he said. ‘It might well be better than the private sector has done – but many public sector organisations are already used to managing their energy usage.’
Maddocks said the CRC was forcing many councils to get to grips with their energy usage for the first time, assessing their full property portfolios and finding easy efficiencies.
But, he added, ‘registration is relatively easy – there are concerns around the trading side, the buying and selling of carbon allowances’, as few public bodies will have prior expertise in emissions trading.
Andy Johnston, head of the centre for local sustainability at the Local Government Information Unit, said some public bodies ‘probably will have missed the boat’.
But, he noted that the Environment Agency, which runs the scheme, had already pledged to work with those who have failed to register on time, rather than name and shame straight away.
The CRC is intended to reduce emissions among the UK’s biggest polluters that are not already covered by the larger European Union Emissions Trading Scheme.
The registration criteria are complex, but qualifying organisations will be those currently spending around £500,000 a year on electricity.
Participation is mandatory for all departments of the UK, Welsh and Scottish governments. Hundreds of other public bodies including councils are expected to qualify.
The final number of registrants – 2,779 plus the 400 still being processed – is significantly less than the 5,000–6,000 expected when the CRC was launched. Public Finance understands that many ‘parent’ organisations have registered in place of their constituent bodies, which could have been large enough to qualify on their own.
Around 8,000 organisations – not including all CRC registrants – have contacted the EA to declare that their energy usage is below the CRC threshold
The idea would be to do a full accounting of how much carbon you could store in a fully populated stock of fish or whales 
