Environmental Commodities Markets And Emissions Trading

Market-based solutions to environmental problems offer great promise, but require complex public policies that take into account the many institutional factors necessary for the market to work and that guard against the social forces that can derail good public policies. Using insights about markets from the new institutional economics, this book sheds light on the institutional history of the emissions trading concept as it has evolved across different contexts. It makes accessible the policy design and practical implementation aspects of a key tool for fighting climate change: emissions trading systems (ETS) for environmental control. Blas Luis Pérez Henríquez analyzes past market-based environmental programs to extract lessons for the future of ETS. He follows the development of the emissions trading concept as it evolved in the United States and was later applied in the multinational European Emissions Trading System and in sub-national programs in the United States such as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) and California’s ETS. This ex-post evaluation of an ETS as it evolves in real time in the real world provides a valuable supplement to what is already known from theoretical arguments and simulation studies about the advantages and disadvantages of the market strategy. Political cycles and political debate over the use of markets for environmental control make any form of climate policy extremely contentious. Pérez Henríquez argues that, despite ideological disagreements, the ETS approach, or, more popularly, 'cap-and-trade' policy design, remains the best hope for a cost-effective policy to reduce GHG emissions around the world.

Winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles of 2010 award. This book is a comprehensive and accessible guide to understanding the opportunities offered by regulated and voluntary carbon markets for tackling climate change. Coverage includes: - An overview of the problem of climate change, with a concise review of the most recent scientific evidence in different fields - A highly accessible introduction to the economic theory and different constitutive elements of a carbon allowances market - Explanation of the Kyoto Protocol and its flexibility mechanisms - Explanation of how the EU Emissions Trading Scheme works in practice - Ongoing developments in regulated carbon markets in the US - Up-to-the-minute coverage of regulated carbon markets in Australia - Developments in New Zealand and Japan - Carbon offsetting and voluntary carbon markets. Combining theoretical aspects with practical applications, this book is for business leaders, financiers, carbon traders, lawyers, bankers, researchers, policy makers and anyone interested in market mechanisms to mitigate climate change. The carbon emissions resulting from the production of this book have been calculated, reduced and offset to render the bookcarbon neutral. Published with CO2 Neutral

The United States accounts for 25% of the Global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. To keep pace with growing electricity demands, the U.S and developing countries are turning more to coal-fired generation with correspondingly greater GHG emissions and other forms of pollution. Therefore, it is imperative to focus on what can be done to reverse this trend. At the same time, technologies for renewable energy generation and energy efficiency are available, and increasingly, these are being deployed on a cost-competitive basis. Environmental financial trading and the markets offer a solution and a way forward through Green Trading! Environmental financial trading began in the U.S in 1995 and has since spread to many countries. Green Trading Markets provides valuable information on continued U.S innovations in the context of the global development of green commodity markets. * New ways of leveraging existing assets. * New revenue streams and new opportunities for commodity trading. * various approaches to improving management of greenhouse gases. * Maximising renewable enegy sources

Written by best selling author Peter C. Fusaro and renowned energy market expert and commentator Tom James, this book demonstrates that the forces of energy and environmental issues and linked more than ever before. The beginning of European emissions and trading in 2005 and the implementation of the Kyoto protocol have accelerated efforts already underway in the US to use market forces to remediate environmental issues. Topics such as emissions trading, renewable energy trading, the fourth dimension in energy trading, and new outcomes on green project finance will be analyzed in this book.

This book presents the results of the first full-scale emissions trading schemes in Australia and internationally, arguing these schemes will not be sufficient to 'civilize markets' and prevent dangerous climate change. Instead, it articulates the ways climate policy needs to confront the collective nature of our predicament.

Emissions trading challenges the management of companies in an entirely new manner: Not only does it, like other market-based environmental policy instruments, allow for a bigger flexibility in management decisions concerning emission issues. More importantly, it shifts the mode of governance of environmental policy from hierarchy to market. But how is this change reflected in management processes, decisions and organizational structures? The contributions in this book discuss the theoretical implications of different institutional designs of emissions trading schemes, review schemes that have been implemented in the US and Europe, and evaluate the range of investment decisions and corporate strategies which have resulted from the new policy framework.

Emissions trading schemes figure prominently among policy instruments used to tackle the problem of climate change, and the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), begun in 2005, is the largest cap-and-trade market so far established. In the EU ETS, firms regulated by the scheme are provided with emissions allowances (each a one-time right to emit one ton of greenhouse gases) and can sell their unused allowances to firms that have higher rates of emissions. In this volume, leading economists offer empirical and theoretical perspectives on the early phases of the EU ETS implementation. The contributors discuss the features of the EU ETS market; and regulatory uncertainty stemming from rule changes; the political economy context of the trading scheme, including allowance allocation and the influence of lobbying on abatement decisions; the coexistence of such overlapping instruments for climate policy as pricing and taxation; the relationship between spot and futures markets for allowances, and firms' responses to various features of the EU ETS, including fluctuating allowance prices, free allocation, and links to the Kyoto process. They show that, although the basic theory behind emissions permit markets is straightforward, design features, market structure, and interactions with other policy instruments can influence the efficiency of the scheme.--

As numerous jurisdictions implement emissions mitigation mechanisms that put a price on carbon, this incisive book explores the emerging emissions markets and their diverse and fragmented nature. It proposes an innovative model for connecting such markets, offering a significantly more successful and expeditious achievement of climate policy objectives.