Carbon Trading
Love it or hate it, it looks like carbon trading is going to be a major force in the emissions reduction scene for years to come.
CDM
Here's a list of links and resources focusing aroud the UN FCCC's (Climate Change Commission's) Clean Development Mechanism, which allows Developed Countries, and the companies in them, to help finance clean energy and emissions reduction projects in the developing world in exchange for Carbon Emissions Reduction credits.
This mechanism, although it has its flaws, has the potential to do a great deal of good in the world, as well as drive innovation on many frontiers. Unfortunately, until we ratify Kyoto (or Copenhagen), there's not much US firms can do with this market. So my next posting in this section will be on US carbon trading. But since we do live in a global community, feel free to share your opinions about the CDM and its imports.
German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety
Joint Implementation and Clean Development Mechanism Section
CDM-Cooperation.de - an industry portal cooperating with the above ministry, designed for use by German businesses, with a tremendous amount of information available regarding host country info, CDM businesses focused on Latin America and news regarding the Latin market.
Point Carbon – one of the premier industry websites for carbon and energy trading info; a good site for trading news, political info and data and statistics regarding the global carbon market. This is a really powerful tool. It has a number of free services available; however the best stuff unfortunately requires an incredibly expensive subscription (1295 Euros!), but has a 28 day free trial.
UNFCCC CDM Homepage – UNFCCC’s main web resource regarding CDM projects, along with news, development guides, project walkthrough
Andy Revkin of the New York Times has a great article on his DotEarth blog today explaining the US climate change bill, and talking about the next big step - getting it through the US Senate without gutting it entirely. As it is, the last minute horse trading has made it far weaker than initially proposed - we shall see what happens next...
On the other side of the debate are guy like Wall Street Journal Op-Ed contributor Kim Strassel, who rallied climate change skeptics in an article entitled "The Climate Change Climate Change." I'd take it with a grain of salt, but there are some interesting points made and things to look at there. Really it just reminds us that the debate isn't really one-sided, and even if you feel it is, there are other folks out there who are quite intelligent and think otherwise.
But as far as I'm concerned, climate change legislation would be a positive thing regardless of the factuality of climate change. Frankly, if concern about climate change leads us to be more efficient and careful with our fossil fuel usage, and spurs innovation in the myriad new renewable energy fields now cropping up worldwide, that would be enough. And if carbon trading provides some tax revenue to reinvest into technology incubators and subsidies for reasearchm development and cleaner air, that's fine with me (as long as the derivatives market doesn't get too abusive - Wall Street has quite the reputation there...)
