The EU carbon market: A graveyard for speculators?

Chart source

Carbon prices in the EU have set record lows, but first the eight critical questions for climate change proponents!

1. Why can't warming alarmists produce a single legitimate example of empirical evidence to support the manmade global-warming hypothesis? 


2. Why has Earth been warming for 300 years when man has only emitted measurable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere for the last 150 years? 


3. Why did Earth cool for 500 years before the recent 300-year warming and warm for several hundred years before that when even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says CO2 levels did not change?

4. Why was the Medieval Warm Period, a thousand years ago, warmer than today even though the CO2 level was 38 percent lower than today? 


5. Why did many of Earth's major glaciers in the Alps. Asia, New Zealand and Patagonia begin to retreat nearly half a century before the Industrial Revolution and man's CO2 emissions? 


6. Of the last five interglacials, going back 400,000 years, why is our current interglacial the coolest of the five even though Earth's CO2 level is about 35 percent higher? 


7. Why has our current 10,000-year-long Holocene epoch been warmer than today for 50 percent of the time when CO2 levels were about 35 percent lower than today? 


8. Why are correlations of Earth's temperature with natural factors such as sunspot numbers, solar cycle lengths, solar magnetic variations and changes in major ocean currents all better than the correlation of Earth's temperature with CO2 levels? (WND)

Whether you click on the picture above to increase its size or leave it as it is, I defy the layman in Carbon Emission Reduction certificates (CER) to explain this flowchart in ten words or less.

In theory company's would be allotted a certain number of emission permits that would allow them to discharge a specific volume of pollutants.

If they go over that amount they can then buy emission permits from a another company that has excess emission permits, or, if the first company did not need all of its emission permits they could sell those emission permits to a company that needed them.

A no-brainer that's very simple and straightforward!

But the question was and still is how a national cap and trade system in the United States would operate and just how negatively it would affect business and the economy if one were ever implemented.

European Union Emission Trading Scheme

At the Durban, South Africa climate talks the resulting Durban Platform says that by 2015 the participants needed to come to an agreement to start reducing emissions in 2020.

For those who are believers in the idea of man-made global warming (of which I am not) the result was less than satisfactory.

For those who believe that climate change is a natural phenomenon that ebbs and flows over time (a theory in which I believe), the process of kicking the can down the road in this case is satisfactory.

In the meantime the EU carbon prices on the ICE fell to an all-time low for a variety of reasons which includes:

1. The weakness in the euro,
2. The Eurozone financial crisis and its impact on the economy,
3. The failure of the Durban meeting to come to any solid conclusion,
4. The decision by OPEC to maintain output levels high, and
5. The decision by Canada to pull itself out of the Kyoto Protocol.

But, as the chart below shows, life is not so bad if you've been short carbon! The long side, not so much!

Chart source

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Related articles

• Firms press EU over carbon price (bbc.co.uk)
• Carbon price hits all-time low (junkscience.com)
• Durban talks both good and bad for REDD+, says expert (terragaia.wordpress.com)