(April 4, 2008) Superlatives abound whenever the talk turns to Jatropha. In a very short time the tropical shrub has mutated from being a poisonous wild plant into the world’s miracle plant for agrofuel production. But as has been demonstrated in India, this does not mean the end of the competition between gas tank and plate.
World Bank climate funds: “a huge leap backwards”
(April 1, 2008) The recently proposed climate investment funds to be administered by the World Bank are under heavy fire for proposing a governance structure that replicates the inequities of the Bank’s board, undermines the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) and fails to clarify whether money to these funds would be additional to G8 commitments on overseas development aid. Meanwhile World Bank’s support for coal-fired power generation is on the increase.
A Realistic Policy on International Carbon Offsets
(April 1, 2008) As the United States designs its strategy for regulating emissions of greenhouse gases, two central issues have emerged. One is how to limit the cost of compliance while still maintaining environmental integrity. The other is how to “engage” developing countries in serious efforts to limit emissions. Industry and economists are rightly concerned about cost control yet have found it difficult to mobilize adequate political support for control mechanisms such as a “safety valve;” they also rightly caution that currently popular ideas such as a Fed-like Carbon Board are not sufficiently fleshed out to reliably play a role akin to a safety valve.
New documentary examines the impact of carbon trading
(January 16, 2008) The Carbon Connection, a new documentary by Fenceline Films with support from Carbon Trade Watch and the Transnational Institute is now available at the New Internationalist online shop.
Banks see green in carbon projects: Investing directly adds to potential for profits In emissions trading
(December 18, 2007) For financial firms such as Barclays PLC; Allianz SE’s Dresdner Kleinwort and its carbon expert, Ingo Ramming; and Morgan Stanley, the decision to get their hands dirty with carbon-reduction projects is adding a new dimension to the emerging carbon-trading business. By getting directly involved, the firms are no longer simply acting as middlemen executing trades but are sometimes flexing their own financing muscle as well.
Seeing Redd: Avoided deforestation and the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities
(June 1, 2007) A look at the effect UN deforestation programs could have on the livelihoods of indigenous people.
From papal indulgences to carbon credits: Is global warming a sin?
(April 28, 2007) In a couple of hundred years, historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then, as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet’s rapid downward slide.
Carbon Boondoggles
(April 26, 2007) To reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, Canada’s federal government plans to push Canadian corporations into buying carbon credits under the so-called “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM), a system established under the Kyoto Protocol by which companies in rich countries buy “rights to pollute” from companies in poor countries. The poor-country companies, in exchange, promise to give up their own greenhouse-gas producing activities.
Ethanol craze may starve the poor
(April 4, 2007) Biofuels have tied oil and food prices together in ways that could profoundly upset the relationships between food producers, consumers and nations in the years ahead, with potentially devastating implications for bothglobal poverty and food security.
Theory and practice of cap and trade
(March 1, 2007) But if the investors don’t opt for the projects with the greatest abatement per dollar invested, which is the case if other objectives intrude, then the cap-and-trade system won’t bring about the beautifully efficient, minimum-cost reduction of emissions that economists and environmental lobbyists dream about. And Kyoto will cost more than current estimates allow.
China Cashes In on Global Warming–Critics Fret Lucrative Carbon Credits Hurt Clean-Energy Efforts
(January 8, 2007) China is turning its environmental problems into a shrewdly managed financial asset, capitalizing on corporate and governmental efforts to curb global warming. How much China’s actions will do for the atmosphere remains an open question.
China Cashes In on Global Warming: Critics Fret Lucrative Carbon Credits Hurt Clean-Energy Efforts
(January 8, 2007) Chinese officials are quickly learning how to play the carbon credit game, writes the Wall Street Journal.
Ethiopia’s food aid addiction
(February 2, 2006) Like a patient addicted to pain killers, Ethiopia seems hooked on aid.
Chinese Power Giant to Sell Carbon Dioxide to Spain under CDM Contract
(January 23, 2006) The Chinese electric utility Huaneng and the Spanish National Power Corporation Endesa have unveiled a pioneering initiative for purchasing emissions credits generated under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), according to the 21st Century Business Herald. The deal, announced January 19 in Beijing, is the first in China’s power sector to be put into implementation. This initiative will generate roughly 3 billion RMB (US $375 million) for Huaneng and benefit the utility’s fledgling wind power projects.
China sends smoke signals on Kyoto Protocol
(March 12, 2002) In addition to ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, China has also joined an alternative forum, the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, which groups the world’s six leading greenhouse-gas emitting nations.
Patricia Adams
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