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| Sourced From Energytribune.com |
It didn’t take long. On July 5, just nine days after the House passed the cap and trade bill (also known as Waxman-Markey) Chinese officials made it clear they are opposed to any carbon taxation scheme. Yao Jian, the spokesman for China’s Commerce Ministry, said the bill violates basic principles of the World Trade Organization and said that the ruse of environmental protection was being used to protect trade and that it could induce a trade war.
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Reuters today revealed through an undisclosed source that the British firm Sindicatum Carbon Capital (SCC) has been successful in raising $280 million to support carbon offset projects on a global scale. Dubai-based Istithmar contributed around 25% of the fund whereas most of the remaining came from US endowment funds and pension funds.
SCC previously tried to raise around $300 million in the first quarter of 2008 but the efforts weren’t really successful due to a declining economy. The current deal, however, is a new sign of hope for the global carbon offsets market.
“This is quite a strong signal I think that this market works and this company works,” the unnamed source asserted.
Shares of EcoSecurities fell by 80% during the past 14 months as delays in project approvals by the United Nations only worsened the market conditions. Nevertheless, the SCC fund has boosted confidence in caps mainly due to its 10-year commitment. It has been reported that the funds will be used to finance around 80% of the money for over 40 projects, 10-15% of which are US-based whereas the rest reside in Asian countries, mainly China and India.
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If you transport a thousand tonnes of plastic bottles from industries to ports by road, load them onto gigantic ships, take those ships 10,000 miles away from the UK to China, unload all the waste bottles, and move them to recycling centers, that’s going to generate lots of carbon emissions. Nevertheless, a recent UK-based study shows this whole process is still environmentally friendly rather than sending the waste to landfills in the UK!
Waste Resources Action Programme (WRAP) mentions in the report that recycling is far better for the environment than landfilling, even if you ship waste from one end of the world to another. When used paper is taken from Britain to China for recycling, it saves around two-third emissions that would have otherwise resulted from landfilling. And when it comes to plastic bottles, savings are even greater.
In addition to all this, since most ships go empty from the UK back to China because of the imbalance of trade, they would release CO2 whether you export waste or not. WRAP estimates that every tonne of waste recycled this way results in emissions reductions of around 1300-1600 kg of CO2.
“We do not have a manufacturing base here. Ideally, it would be dealt with here. But we would far prefer to see it recycled in China, where it is a resource, than landfilled in Britain”, stated a Wastewatch representative.
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Recent analysis by New Carbon Finance (NCF) reveals most of the ‘easy’ carbon credit projects are already being availed and chances are high that such low-price credits will diminish sharply in future. Afterwards, greater efforts and higher investments would have to be put in to gain carbon credits.
Up till now, most cheap credits have come mainly from elimination of two kinds of waste gases, HFC-23 and N2O. These two gases have a greater impact on global warming as compared to carbon dioxide. Due to this larger scale of emissions reductions, low-investment projects have resulted in cheaper carbon credits. However, since most projects cutting these two gases are already operational, future projects would have to earn credits through renewable energy and energy efficiency. This may result in at least a fivefold increase in project costs, which would eventually raise the price of carbon.
“As these ‘easy’ carbon credits come to an end, project developers will increasingly look to develop more projects at higher costs,” states Yan Sheng, a Beijing-based NCF analyst.
In the current situation, China and India are expected to generate most of these new credits at 38% and 17% respectively.
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Camco International closed a big, big carbon offsets deal on Tuesday, selling over 150,000 tonnes of UN-approved offsets that brought the company a profit of $2.6 million. The company refrained from mentioning the buyer of these Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) but confirmed the transaction took place at an average price of $28.39 per tonne. Camco enjoyed a 3.3% increase in its share price after the news broke out.
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“We are delighted that this emission reduction project developed by Camco under a share contract, has created its first carbon revenues for the project owner and Camco,” stated CEO Jeff Kenna.
The company further revealed that it has more than 150 projects running and anticipates over 150 million CERs in the next 4 years. Offsets sold on Tuesday were generated by a methane-capturing project in a Shanxi coal mine in China; the project owner acquired most of the 441,073 CERs generated by this project.
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