EDF Sets Up Carbon Fund
The French electric utility EDF announced today that it is setting up a €300 million ($396 million) carbon fund to help meet its regulatory requirements under the EU ETS, Europe’s regulatory framework to control CO2 emissions. Carbon funds allow companies to make investments that create CO2 emissions reductions in emerging markets, such as upgrades to industrial operations or renewable energy projects, and use the credits generated thus to meet regulatory requirements in their home jurisdictions. This is a good way to concurrently reduce compliance costs at home and foster environmentally-friendly investments in emerging economies. I have discussed...
Hedging Your Climate Risks
Whether you agree it's because of human activity or not (and, for the record, I do), there's no doubt that the weather has been a little wacky over the past few years, driving a range of events that have had very real repercussions on businesses and the economy. Hurricane Katrina is one obvious example, but there have also been other, more subtle cases. Many ski resort operators in North America, for instance, were beginning to believe that winter would never arrive on the eastern side of the continent. In the west, we're now being told that cold weather...
Dead Wrong On Climate Exchange
In a May 8 post I opined that, although I believed that recent developments on the climate change file in the US would bode well for Climate Exchange plc (CXCHF.PK), I thought that the stock was overpriced and had had too great a run for its own good over the past 3 months. I therefore predicted that the next move the stock would make would be to the downside. Climate Exchange was trading at around $28 then, and today it is trading in the neighborhood of $36. I continue to believe that this stock is going way too...
Plastic Recyclers Chasing Arrows
According to Plastics Europe Research Group, over 35 million tons of plastic material was produced globally in 2016, the last year for which full-year data is available. That brought total plastic production to 9 billion tons since 1950. All of those plastic materials remain in existence somewhere - still in use, landfills, junk yards, blowing around the countryside, waterways, oceans, fish stomachs. The post “Plastic Contagion’ on April 13th outline the dangers presented by plastic waste, ranging from respiratory failure from toxic emissions to reproductive interference in aquatic animals.
The building burgeoning volume of plastic waste has sent environmentalists scrambling for solutions to the plastic waste...
NYMEX To Get Involved In Emissions Trading
A senior NYMEX official told reporters Wednesday that the exchange was considering getting into the business of carbon emissions trading. Given the actual, but especially the potential, size of this market, it makes sense that established bourses would take a good hard look at it. This will probably not be seen as very good news by the folks at Climate Exchange plc . Of course, until NYMEX actually unveils anything substantial, this will remain nothing but chatter.
A New Player In The North American Emissions Trading Sector
Over the past two weeks, a couple of announcements were made that went mostly unnoticed despite their importance to the North American carbon marketplace. Firstly, on May 30, the Montreal Exchange, a derivatives exchange, announced that it was launching an emissions trading market for CO2. The Montreal Exchange is now a unit of the TSX Group (TSXPF.PK or X.TO), the firm that runs all of Canada's exchanges. The second announcement came last week, when the premiers of Quebec and Ontario, Canada's two largest provinces and the heart of its industrial base, announced that they were moving ahead...
Competition In Environmental Markets Heats Up
Close followers of the environmental finance space have known it for a while; Climate Exchange (CXCHF.PK or CLE.L) is sitting on a potential gold mine. The market for environmental commodities, but especially carbon emissions, is slated to grow significantly over the next 5 to 7 years. It was therefore only a matter of time before competition sprung up, both from small players trying to leverage their technological platforms and from the big guys. The big guys came out swinging this week, with NYMEX announcing a partnership with JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, among others, to set up a...
Beware The Vagaries Of Government
I just came across this article on potential problems with the emerging trade in carbon credits. The piece is not technical and I wouldn't say that it is particularly well-researched, but it does raise a key point - as the market for carbon emissions grows, the need for standardization and collaboration between governments and regulators will become ever more pressing. This could create problems. The carbon market is unique in that the commodity traded derives its value primarily from its ability to meet the requirements set by an environmental regulator. There is also a market for voluntary...
Some Tidbits From The World Of Emissions Trading
To be sure, the near-term prospects for carbon emissions trading are bleak. Continued decline in industrial production across the world's major manufacturing economies will inevitably lower carbon emissions. The clearest indicator of this, short of directly measuring emissions, is a sharp decline in the price of various fossil energy commodities (i.e. oil, natural gas and coal) on the back of falling demand. Another important factor for carbon emissions trading is that the commodity in play - the regulatory right to emit a unit of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) - derives its legitimacy entirely from a regulatory scheme...
Climate Legislation: Who wins? Who loses?
Most Americans now agree that something needs to be done to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Hopefully most Americans now appreciate that this is not a small, but even more so, not a simple problem. I am a big believer that the playing field for our low carbon future should start level, and the market should be structured to allow our major power and energy companies a chance to lead the way, instead of simply dishing out punishment for our combined historical choices. Carrots and sticks work well together, but sticks alone are not going to solve our...
Is Energy Sourcing the Gateway Drug to Energy Efficiency?
Tom Konrad CFA I recently interviewed Richard Domaleski, CEO of World Energy Solutions (NASD:XWES). World Energy is a comprehensive energy management services firm whose core offering is extremely price competitive energy sourcing (that is, finding an energy provider to supply all of a client's energy needs at the lowest possible cost.) They achieve competitive sourcing using an electronic energy exchange designed to achieve much better price discovery in what is traditionally a very opaque market. According to Domaleski, a recent KEMA study showed that only 7% of large commercial, industrial, and government customers are sourcing their...
Climate Change Will Hurt The Poor Most But the Solutions Don’t Have To
The International Center for Appropriate and Sustainable Technology (iCAST) helps communities use local resources to solve their own problems. I've been a fan of iCAST's approach of teaching people how to fish (or, in this case, how to apply sustainable technologies) rather than giving away fish since I first encountered them at a conference in 2006. Last week, they took advantage of some of their own local resources (namely the fact that the DNC was in Denver) to organize a luncheon with a panel of nationally recognized speakers, any one of whom would have been enough to draw a...
List of Environmental Markets Stocks
This post was last updated on 4/27/2022.
Environmental market stocks are publicly traded companies whose business involves the trading of commodities designed to represent an environmental attribute, such as renewable electricity, the environmental benefits of renewable energy (Renewable Energy Credits ), Carbon Offsets and other types of environmental offsets.
Carbon emission trading implemented
Carbon emission trading scheduled
Carbon tax implemented
Carbon tax scheduled
Carbon emission trading or carbon tax under consideration
By Tbap , via Wikimedia Commons
Crius Energy Trust (KWH-UN.TO, CRIUF)
GlyEco, Inc. (GLYE)
Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure (HASI)
Just Energy Group Inc. (JE)
KraneShares Global Carbon ETF (KRBN)
Trading Emissions PLC (TRE.L)
If you know of...
Climate change, carbon trading and America…it’s only a matter of time
Just a quick follow-up on my carbon trading post a few days ago. Thanks to GreenBiz.com for the heads up on the results of a survey that were released during MIT's seventh annual Carbon Sequestration Initiative Forum. The results show that climate change now tops the list of environmental concerns for Americans. I don't want to reveal too much here since this is a GreenBiz.com story, but it suffices to say that this provides yet more ammunition to the political backers of a framework to reduce greenhouses gases in America. Momentum is building and there will definitely be some...
Investing in Climate Change
This post was supposed to be about coal-to-liquids (CTL), but I came across interesting info yesterday after opening a former colleague’s mail that I thought would make for a more interesting post. The CTL piece will thus have to wait a bit. What was in the package was a hard copy of the January/February 2007 edition of CNBC European Business. This edition is dedicated to climate change, but, more importantly, to how some firms are positioning themselves to benefit from the markets that will be created as a result of regulatory and other actions to tackle greenhouse gas...
Fossil Fuel Industry: Killing the Customer
by Debra Fiakas, CFA
Published by the Climate Accountability Institute, the Carbon Majors Reportlays bare the truth about which companies are responsible for industrial greenhouse gas emissions. One hundred fossil fuel producers are linked to 71% of global industrial greenhouse gases emitted since 1988. Something like a line in the sand for climate scientists, 1988 is the year human-induced climate change was official recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Fossil fuels in the form of coal, crude oil and gas are by far and large the culprits. Rolling forward three decades later, we can observe in the charts below that fossil fuel production...
