Carbon trading has started in Australia with the launch of the Australian Climate Exchange (ACX).
The Herald Sun reports:
Total turnover might have been a thin $13,610 and the initial price $8.50 per tonne of carbon but from small acorns such as this grow lots of trees.And those people growing the trees will be one of the main targets as the carbon credits market tries to gather depth and volume.
Tim Hanlin, managing director of the Australian Climate Exchange (ACX), admitted that the carbon credits market would be “supply constrained” for some time.
In other words, there are plenty of businesses wanting to buy carbon offsets for their emissions and claim to be clean, green and carbon neutral.
The demand for Carbon Credits are mainly from companies which want to voluntarily reduce their emissions and even go with being carbon neutral so as to gain a marketing edge.
One way to do that is to participate in the Australian government sponsored Greenhouse Friendly™ scheme which will certify specific products or services as Carbon neutral.
The Greenhouse Friendly scheme consists of two parts.
One part relates to product and service certification, whereby certified products and services are eligible to be labelled with the Greenhouse Friendly™ logo…Greenhouse Friendly™ product and service certification creates part of the demand for the second part of the initiative – that is, abatement from Greenhouse Friendly™ approved abatement projects.
I really doubt that carbon trading can achieve the goals that everyone thinks they can. I talk about this several times on my blog on global warming http://www.globalwarming-factorfiction.com. The fact that most trading programs tend to be tied to growing plants means that when those plants die, they release that carbon back to the environment so their net effect is relatively small and much smaller than the programs account for.
Sean:
I think like any economic tool, carbon trading will work as designed. If the design is not correct (say excess credits) than the results will be bad.
However, I cannot understand your reasoning of carbon trading being dependent on trees etc.
One of the major credits for carbon comes from emissions that need to be reduced by large industrial and energy companies. And these credits would mean that actual carbon has been reduced.
Also, these plants that you mention are generally large trees with life of 100 yrs or so.
Cheers,
Suhit