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...
emissions trading/ carbon tax and trading world map

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...

Carbon ETFs/ETNs: Playing Copenhagen

Charles Morand At $126 billion transacted in 2008, up from $11 billion in 2005, the global carbon market is the fastest growing commodities market in the world and, provided that an agreement is reached at the COP15 conference in Copenhagen and that the US adopts a cap-and-trade program, this growth could go on for several more years. Yet this is a market that remains comparatively unknown for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the rules surrounding it are very complex. Unlike other commodities, to successfully invest directly in...

Carbon Emissions ETF

Today, while reading an article on cleantech ETFs by The Motley Fool, I found out that XShares Advisors LLC and the Chicago Climate Exchange were working on a carbon emissions-based ETF (PDF document). There is not a lot of info available on what exactly this ETF will track. We reported back in November that UBS had launched an index based on European carbon prices. As noted by Richard Kang at around the same time, this index is well-suited for something like an ETF. If any of our readers have any further insight on this, don't hesitate...

UBS Launches CO2 Emissions Index

UBS (NYSE:UBS) announced on Friday the launch of the UBS World Emissions Index (UBS-WEMI) – the world’s first index based on global carbon markets. At the moment, only the two exchanges linked to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) , the Nordic Power Exchange (Nordpool) and the European Climate Exchange (ECX), qualify for WEMI. The index is composed of future contracts on CO2 weighted between the two trading platforms as follows: ECX, 72.11% and Nordpool, 27.89%. The weights are allocated based upon the liquidity of the underlying exchanges as well as their respective share in the European carbon market....

How Energy Deregulation Affects States and Stocks

by Elaine Thompson Bloomberg New Energy Finance, in an executive summary of its New Energy Outlook 2017 report, predicts renewable energy sources will represent almost three-quarters of the $10.2 trillion the world will invest in new power-generating technology. Analysts outline several reasons for this increase in spending, such as the decreasing costs of wind and solar and consumers’ increasing interest in solar panels. Competition between power sources also continues to grow, with products like utility-scale batteries upsetting coal and natural gas’s roles in the marketplace. But more importantly, state-driven renewable portfolio standards pave the way for additional ventures in renewable energy technologies, particularly...

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...

Avoiding a Carbon-Price Backlash

by Tom Konrad, Ph.D. Economics and Greenery, a Belated Rapprochement It is truly a triumph of economic ways of thinking that many of environmental activists are championing market-based approaches to tackling climate change.   Those people who are not for cap-and-trade on global warming gas emissions promote the even more economically rigorous carbon tax.  The most common defense against criticisms of subsidies for renewable energy is to retort that the fossil fuel industry benefits from much large subsidies.  Not only do fossil fuels get generous subsidies in direct and indirect payments, but they seldom pay anything like the indirect costs...

ADR For Climate Exchange plc

One of our readers made a useful comment on our last post about Goldman Sachs and Climate Exchange plc. I thought some of you who are unlikely to go back to that post might be interested: "Hey this article on the Climate Exchange was great information. But you should tell your readers that there is an ADR trading OTC here in the states - CXCHF. Get it while the gettin is good. How long 'til GS takes this to the big board?" Thanks for this heads up, cascadehigh. UPDATE: Following this post, I got the...

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...

Biochar’s Likely Market Impacts

Biochar is still mostly a research and cottage industry, yet it has the potential to impact returns for a broad range of investors. Tom Konrad, Ph.D., CFA Biochar, or amending soil with biomass-derived carbon, shows great potential to improve the productivity of soils, as well as to increase the utilization of fertilizers by plants, while sequestering carbon to reduce the drivers of climate change.  On August 10, I went to the 2009 North American Biochar Conference to look at the potential for investors.  Before I went, I took a look at the publicly traded companies...

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...

The Republican-Proposed Carbon Tax

by Noah Kaufman A group of prominent conservative Republicansincluding former Secretary of State James Baker III, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, former Secretary of State George Shultz and former Walmart Chairman Rob Waltonmet with key members of the Trump administration on Wednesday about their proposal to tax carbon dioxide emissions and return the proceeds to the American people. Such an economy-wide tax on carbon dioxide could enable the United States to achieve its international emissions targets with better economic outcomes than under a purely regulatory approach. Attributes of the Republican Carbon Tax Proposal While the details on the...

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...

Climate Change & Corporate Disclosure: Should Investors Care?

Charles Morand On Monday morning, I received an e-copy of a new research note by BofA Merrill Lynch arguing that disclosure by publicly-listed companies on the issue of climate change was becoming increasingly "important". The note claimed: "e believe smart investors and companies will recognize the edge they can gain by understanding low carbon trends." I couldn't agree more with that statement. It was no coincidence that on that same day the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a non-profit UK-based organization that surveys public companies each year on the state of their climate change awareness, was...

US Exchanges And Environmental Investing

An interesting bit of follow-up on my article last week about exchanges and environmental markets. Both the NYMEX and the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) have partnered up, in the past 2 weeks, with specialty cleantech and alt energy index makers to launch derivatives products. On March 14, Chicago Climate Futures Exchange (CCFE), a wholly owned subsidiary of the CCX, and WilderShares LLC, announced (PDF document) a licensing agreement to launch a futures market based on the WilderHill Clean Energy Index . The ECO is also the underlying index for the Powershares WilderHill Clean Energy Portfolio ETF...
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