A little quote from the BusinessGreen website
“The potential impact on low-carbon investments of failing to deliver a meaningful deal at the forthcoming Copenhagen Summit was underlined last week with the news that analyst firm Point Carbon is downgrading its long-term price forecasts, primarily as a result of growing uncertainty at the prospects of an international climate change deal being reached.”
What this means is that when carbon price is low, trading carbon credits is less profitable, so there is less of an incentive to reduce carbon emissions in order to have more credits to sell.
Of course, if there is scarcity of carbon credits, that could also drive prices up, but that is mere speculation. The BusinessGreen website is from the UK and they suggest that the European governments, including the UK, may intervene in the ETS market — the European equivalent of the US cap and trade system — to drive up the price of carbon to promote low-carbon investments.
That would mean throwing government money to incite corporations to invest money in R&D so as to reduce their carbon footprint so as to sell carbon credits to other corporations too lazy or cheap or malicious to invest in R&D and reduce their own carbon footprint. That sounds way too complicated for me, only governments would think such convoluted schemes.
Haven’t corporations and governments heard that ordinary consumers are getting more and more concerned about the environment and that corporations who show themselves as being green do attract consumers. When Wal-Mart decided to change all their lighting fixtures in all their stores to low consumption lighting, and that they even promoted the sale of low energy light bulbs as well as forcing their suppliers to package their products with less packaging and more “eco-friendly” materials, that gave them some good press.
More and more large corporations are jumping on the green bandwagon as well as the philanthropy bandwagon, which at times can be the same bandwagon, depending upon what humanitarian causes one embraces. Being good, being green is good PR. Why need all that government money and artificial incentives when being good is good for business?
If governments want to get involved, they should put more money in quality education so that more consumers are aware of all that is at stakes in our world today as it relates to climate change so that they are even more encouraged to seek out products from corporations genuinely making a difference. For example, Richard Branson, of Virgin, is investing a lot of money to come up with a good bio fuel for his Virgin airways planes. Other airline companies would also benefit from that R&D. If Branson owns that bio fuel company, more power to him since he took the investment risks in developing a better fuel.
In the end, profits is what makes the world go round, not subsidies, rules and coercion. If you can make money helping the world, what more can you ask for?
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