Speculators main buyers in EU carbon auctions -report
17 May 2013
LONDON, May 17 (Reuters Point Carbon) – Banks and trading houses bought more than two thirds of the 138 million carbon permits sold by 25 European governments between Nov. 2012 and Feb. 2013 to help power plants and factories comply with the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, an EU Commission report published Friday showed.
Six “credit institutions” and six “investment firms” dominated the 35 auctions held over that period, picking up as much as 80 percent of the allowances sold in January alone, the report said, adding that only one of those companies was eligible to bid on behalf of clients.
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Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs - its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign - sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs....
Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming?Maybe - but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.
"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedgefund director who' spoke out against oil-futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want, It's just asinine."
Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees - while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.
It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.
But this is it. This is the world we live in now. -By MATT TAIBBI, in
ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE. JULY 9-23, 2009 https://sites.google.com/site/disclosuredelta/
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California and Quebec have linked cap-and-trade, but the U.S. Senate killed a bill (Waxman-Markey) five years ago that would have created a national program. Yet, the EPA’s Clean Power Plan would impose basically a cap-and-trade scheme in states that don’t submit their own plans to reduce CO2 emissions from power plants.
Cap-and-trade is a vastly overpriced system with “all pain and no gain.” For example, although Waxman-Markey had a lofty if not impossible goal of an 83% reduction of U.S. emissions of by 2050, this would have reversed just 3% of the human influence on climate, equating to about 0.09°F. From 2012-2035, one estimate has a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme causing an accumulated GDP loss of $9.4 trillion.
The European Union (EU) created its own cap-and-trade, Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in 2005.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2015/10/01/cap-and-trade-green-climate-fund-are-fraught-with-fraud/#7197cc6e2ba5
Russia and Ukraine are accused of selling fake credits for 600 million tons worth of CO2 emissions on the EU ETS. Verification of reductions is difficult and lax, so companies can easily make fake claims and sell away their credits. In 2011, the EU’s online emissions marketplace was taken for $41 million in undeserved credits.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2015/10/01/cap-and-trade-green-climate-fund-are-fraught-with-fraud/2/#639b11008c6f
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12-7-2012 The best that any carbon tax in the United States could ever hope to achieve would be to reduce the amount of global warming across the 21st century from about 3.0°C down to about 2.8°C. And that tiny, inconsequential reduction would only occur if all greenhouse gas emissions from the United States were halted forever, starting tomorrow, which isn't the plan.
The emissions reductions under any sort of carbon tax will be realized slowly, reducing the magnitude of the global temperature rise that the tax would avert. For example, a carbon tax designed to smoothly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions from their current level to zero by the year 2100 would result in only about 0.1°C of global temperature "savings"—an amount, on its own, not worth pursuing.
-Paul Knappenberger, Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute.
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