Tag Archives: green
China Unveils Details Of Pilot Carbon-Trading Programme
Nation’s first trading scheme in the southern city of Shenzhen will cover 638 companies when it begins next month Jonathan Kaiman in Beijing guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 May 2013 16.38 BST China has unveiled details of its first pilot carbon-trading programme, which will begin next month in the southern city of Shenzhen. The trading scheme will cover 638 companies responsible for 38% of the city’s total emissions, the Shenzhen branch of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced on Wednesday. The scheme will eventually expand to include transportation, manufacturing and construction companies. Shenzhen is one of seven designated areas in which the central government plans to roll out experimental carbon trading programmes before 2014. China is the world’s biggest carbon emitter and burns almost as much coal as the rest of the world’s countries combined. Li Yan, Greenpeace east Asia’s climate and energy campaign manager, said that the pilot programmes will inform the central government on how to motivate local authorities to adopt low-carbon policies. The push to reduce carbon emissions coincides with the newly installed leadership’s effort to tackle the country’s dire air pollution problem, which has emerged as a source of widespread anger and frustration in recent months. “Having a mid-term strategy, and trying to prepare years ahead, is actually in line with China’s interests and its political and social priorities,” she said. On Monday, the Chinese newspaper 21st Century Business Herald reported that the NDRC has discussed implementing a national system to control the intensity and volume of carbon emissions by 2020. The agency expects China to reach its carbon emissions peak by 2025, five years earlier than many recent estimates, according to unnamed sources quoted in the article. At a recent climate change meeting, the agency “announced that it’s currently researching and calculating a timetable for the greenhouse gas emissions peak, and will vigorously strive to implement a total emissions control scheme during the ’13th five-year plan’ period (from 2016-2020),” the paper quoted a NDRC official, also unnamed, as saying. “The NDRC is looking for a national cap, but nobody knows exactly when that is going to happen,” said Wu Changhua, greater China director of the Climate Group. “There’s still a lot of work to be done.” The EU’s carbon trading scheme, the world’s largest, has suffered repeated setbacks in recent months. In April, MEPs voted against a proposed reform aimed to raise the price of carbon, which has been diluted by an overabundance of permits. Read the full article at: http://www.guardian….n#ixzz2Uh94cM8l Continue reading
Commission Repeats Calls For Carbon Market Reform As Surplus Allowances Double
The number of surplus carbon permits under the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) doubled to two billion last year, the European Commission has announced. 21 May 2013 Topics Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said that the figures for 2012 underlined the need for urgent action to address the “supply-demand imbalance” under the struggling scheme. “The good news is that emissions declined again in 2012,” she said. “The bad news is that the supply-demand imbalance has further worsened in large part due to a record use of international credits.” “At the start of phase 3, we see a surplus of almost two billion allowances. These facts underline the need for the European Parliament and Council to act swiftly on back-loading,” she said. The European Parliament rejected a proposal by the European Commission to ‘backload’ a number of allowances under the scheme , as a temporary measure to address falling prices and lack of demand, last month. The proposal will be refined by the Parliament’s Environmental Committee, before returning to Parliament for a new vote next month. The EU ETS was established in 2005 and was the first major emissions trading scheme in the world. Phase 3 began on 1 January 2013, and runs until 2020. Under the scheme there is a cap on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from prescribed energy intensive installations. Installations must purchase GHG emissions allowances, called European Union Allowances (EUAs), which represent the right to emit or discharge a specific volume of emissions in line with national allocation plans. Operators of installations must hold EUAs equal to, or more than, total emissions at the end of the EU ETS year and those with excess allowances can ‘bank’ them or trade with those who need to buy more allowances to comply with emissions limits. The European Commission’s proposals would see 900 million allowances that would otherwise have been made available for auction between 2013 and 2015 transferred to later in the third phase of the EU ETS. By doing this, the Commission hopes to address the build-up in allowances caused by reduced industrial activity during the economic downturn. The price of allowances is currently below €4 per tonne according to Thomson Reuters Point Carbon – well below a historical average of €30 per tonne. According to the Commission’s figures, the number of surplus allowances rose from around 950 million at the end of 2011 to almost two billion by the end of 2012. This was due to a “combination” of the use of international credits, auctioned allowances from earlier phases of the scheme and remaining free allowances granted to new entrants to the scheme. Since 2008, the EU ETS has allowed installations to use international emissions reduction credits generated under the Kyoto Protocol to offset part of their emissions. Compliance with the rules of the scheme was “high” in 2012, according to the Commission. Less than 1% of participating installations did not surrender allowances to cover their 2012 emissions by the deadline of 30 April 2013, while aircraft operators responsible for over 98% of 2012’s aviation emissions had also fulfilled their responsibilities under the scheme. This year, aviation emissions fell under the EU ETS for the first time; however aircraft operators were given the option to limit reporting to only those flights within Europe. Environmental law expert Eluned Watson of Pinsent Masons said previously that backloading was merely a “quick fix” for the EU ETS, but that more time would be needed to put together a longer term reform package. ” Urgent action is required, backed by clear legislative support, to structurally reform the EU ETS and to rebalance the supply and demand of allowances in the EU ETS market, ” she said, as prices fell to a record low of €2.81 a tonne at the start of this year. “Although the backloading proposal is very much a ‘quick fix’, reactionary measure, it is clear that longer term structural reform will take time, with changes unlikely to be in place until 2017 at the earliest,” she said. Continue reading
World Bank Reduces UN Offset Supply Forecast as Price Slumps
By Alessandro Vitelli May 29, 2013 The World Bank revised down its projection for the supply of United Nations carbon offsets in the eight years through 2020 by 30 percent, after a collapse in prices deterred projects that generate the credits. Supply of UN Certified Emission Reductions and Emission Reduction Units will be about 1.9 billion metric tons in the period, the lender said in a report released today, revising down an estimate of 2.7 billion made a year earlier. Demand will be about 1.6 billion tons, creating a surplus of 300 million, the World Bank said, without providing a comparable figure. Front-year CER futures plunged 99 percent from their peak in July 2008 to a record 20 euro cents ($0.26) a ton last month as regulators in the European Union struggled to tackle a glut of emissions permits in the bloc’s market. The December contract rose 2.6 percent to 40 euro cents at 2:32 p.m. on London’s ICE Futures Europe exchange. “The price of primary CERs is lower than the cost of issuance for many projects,” Alex Kossoy, a senior finance specialist at the World Bank, said today at a press conference in Barcelona. “Without substantial change it’s doubtful many projects will continue to pursue issuance of credits.” Project Slump Carbon offsets allow buyers to acquire emissions-reduction credits more cheaply than it would cost to reduce pollution at home. The EU’s emissions market allowed power stations and factories to use offsets equivalent to about 14 percent of their total greenhouse-gas output in the five years through 2012. The UN credits are created by projects in developing countries, such as Vietnam, or economies in transition, including Russia. The number of offset projects seeking approval by the UN’s regulator, the Clean Development Mechanism Executive Board, slumped to 17 in February 2013, compared with 256 at the same time last year, the report showed. In March, the number was 18 compared with 278 in 2012. “Some analysts forecast an 80 percent year-on-year reduction in the number of projects submitted for validation in 2013 compared with 2012,” the World Bank said. Most of the demand for UN offsets will come from companies participating in the European Union Emissions Trading System and EU member countries looking to meet caps on discharges under the Kyoto Protocol. Several countries that had previously bought offsets as part of their commitment to the first period of the Kyoto Protocol that ended last year, haven’t signed on to a second Kyoto period, curtailing their demand for credits. ‘Political Commitment’ “A high-level political commitment from a large number of developed countries will be needed to encourage new investment” in offset projects, Kossoy said. The report doesn’t calculate the value or size of the global market as it has done in previous years. Instead, it represents a “one-stop shop” for details and analysis of all current and new emissions-trading systems and carbon taxes around the world, according to Kossoy. “Current market conditions invalidate any attempt and interest to undertake the same qualitative and transaction-based analysis,” he said. To contact the reporter on this story: Alessandro Vitelli in London at avitelli1@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Lars Paulsson at lpaulsson@bloomberg.net Continue reading
