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…Unless of course the “House” gets shut down on charges of corruption, fraud, bribery, price fixing and graft. At which point the rest of the story just recedes into fading history.
Nobody gives much thought to Enron anymore these days…
However, back in it’s heady heyday, Enron had become an energy giant with bets hedged into solar, wind, and of course its main play in natural gas. Enron had also become a key proponent to the Kyoto Protocol which sought to trade in carbon offset credits, via a system very similar to the EPA’s Sulphur Dioxide cap-trade program. A program which Enron itself had already championed to demonstrate it’s corporate environmental responsibility, while profitably reigning in the polluting activities of competing Coal-fired electricity production. This was also an effective hedge against the performance of it’s own natural gas assets, which clearly underpinned the more economical method of generating electricity, while the Sulphur Dioxide credits remained fully priced for coal driven power.
For more Environmental Games you can also open:
“Climate Change: Gaming the Odds”
Since the time when Enron had placed it’s first bets in SO2 stack-scrubbing, the underlying technologies have been greatly improved, the costs reduced, and therefore the market for SO2 credits has cooled significantly, since it’s now cheaper to simply reduce SO2 emissions than to buy offsetting credits.
Of course, Enron has also taken its infamous fall from grace as well, but the potential for financial gains from such a cap-and-trade system was already very well demonstrated. This credit trading system, which had been administered by the Chicago Board of Trade was now well established, and primed for a new application, but what would the next application be for this new way to print currency, erm “credits” – who’s adoption would surely be driven by precisely tuned Political positions, and well publicised environmental necessities? As we all know, the next objective has been to commodetize CO2 into”carbon-credits”. Ultimately, by making huge economic and environmental gains in a market driven trade of these assets, Carbon offset credits are set to open up a world of possibilities.
”Enron stood to profit millions from global warming energy-trading schemes”
- Mike Carey President of the Ohio Coal Association and American Coal Coalition
There’s certainly so very much more to come on this subject, but for now let it suffice to say, that there’s obviously a great deal of money to be made in the CO2 considerations, implications, and well-vested interests that underpin a properly publicized and well-managed Green Movement. Please don’t get up yet though, because this game is just getting underway…
Here is more info on the commercial gains being made from a potentially “Captive Market for Carbon Dioxide”
Filed under: climate change | Tagged: Al Gore, Carbon Credits, Coal, Enron, Mike Carey, Natural Gas
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Is there a problem systematically combining capitalism (the driving force in innovation for the last 200 -300 years) and a global fight against man-made climate change? People will make money but we will all profit.
I have no prob with that premise at it’s core, of course.
So long as it doesn’t just turn into (another?) wealth re-distribution scheme, where only key benefactors profit from or inside knowledge leveraged via a systemic bottleneck, to become a new administrative “tax” – that actuay just winds up being another drain on the larger REAL economy.
Without clear standards on how carbon-offset credits are created, disbursed, monitored, and regulated, many people still beleive that the credit/money is better spent right away on energy saving technologies for an immediate impact on “carbon-footprints” (for those who can still reduce consumption further), and on wider more critical research into mitigating factors behind the Global Warming issue. Rather than deferign funds into an imature carbon offset scheme, that is built upon incomplete and highly biased “scientific” methods.
In the meantime, pure capitalism might certainly be a good motivator, but a market driven systems for trading “carbon credits” might simply become a drain for much needed resources. Akin to the enormous amounts of wealth that are generated and skimmed through currency, commodity, and securities exchanges, while offering little new value to the actual GDP of a society/nation…besides supporting secondary/sundry/service industries I suppose.
I’d feel much better about Carbon Credit trading if it were made impossible to generate large/surplus profits simply from trading in the system, and perhaps only enable participants to reduce their losses. I’d like to see where the prevailing/underpinning science would go, if the concept lost such a motivating factor. Surely, there are other (investment) vehicles to finance such progress?
Otherwise, Greed and Gain will certainly remain an excellent prime motivator to keep things moving along, I’m sure.
The “carbon credit” and “cap and trade” programs are thinly disguised corporate welfare. It’s a huge tax on all economic activity, with the profits going to insiders.