Monthly Archives: June 2009

Carbon credits incentive drives Indian cities to CNG buses

Posted on
2

Cities plump for Central scheme, take to CNG buses – Home – livemint.com

The opportunity to earn money by selling carbon credits, growing environmental awareness and the novelty value of buses fuelled by compressed natural gas (CNG) may have prompted some 14 cities to order hundreds of CNG vehicles, taking advantage of a one-time funding scheme offered by the Centre.

The opportunity to earn money by selling carbon credits, growing
environmental awareness and the novelty value of buses fuelled by
compressed natural gas (CNG) may have prompted some 14 cities to order
hundreds of CNG vehicles, taking advantage of a one-time funding scheme
offered by the Centre.

Green fleet: Low-floor CNG buses run by Delhi Transport Corporation. Ramesh Pathania / Mint

Green fleet: Low-floor CNG buses run by Delhi Transport Corporation. Ramesh Pathania / Mint
The cities that have placed orders for CNG buses include Visakhapatnam, Delhi, Indore, Ujjain, Thane, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Pimpri Chinchwad, Agartala, Tripura, Agra, Kanpur and Lucknow, according to urban development secretary
M. Ramachandran. Many of these cities are getting CNG vehicles for the first time, he added.

CNG is a substitute for petrol and diesel, and considered to be a more environmentally clean alternative to those fuels. Trading of carbon credits awarded for controlling emissions offers a potentially lucrative opportunity for cities that switch to CNG-fuelled public bus fleets.

“We have a carbon credit system that is under validation and if we go for CNG, it helps us in getting money,” said S.C. Garg, chief technical adviser for Indore’s city transport service. The municipality also reasoned that the prices of
diesel, which is the preferred fuel for most bus operators, are likely to increase at a faster rate than the price of CNG. “Also, we can tell people to come and sit in a CNG bus for the first time,” he added.

The Australian ETS is coming

Posted on
1

Business Spectator – Lifting the carbon fog – Giles Parkinson

Amid all the political posturing about to take centre stage as the government’s emissions trading bill works its way through the House of Representatives, there have been moments of great clarity in the debate in recent days that business will do well to take on board.

The first was the admission from opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull that an emissions trading scheme is inevitable. If not now, then sometimes very soon.

If this was a statement of the bleeding obvious to those who have followed the issue closely, the admission bursts through the political fog as a clarion call to business: There will be a carbon price in the global economy that needs to be factored into all aspects of the business, and up and down the supply chain, and with carbon-conscious business customers at home and abroad. This will create impacts and opportunities, and the sooner Australian business comes to grips with it – particularly with its dependence on fossil-fuelled energy – the better.

The second piece of clarity in the debate was the emergence of Santos CEO David Knox into the public arena on the issue of the ETS and its potential delay.

Fielding’s Open Mind

Posted on
Reply

I saw the lateline edition on ABC Australia on their latest iView internet TV player.

Steve Fielding, a Family First Senator, is a crucial vote for the Rudd government’s Emission Trading Scheme.

He is attending a climate skeptic conference and meeting with the Obama Administration about climate change issues.  He is self-funding the trip to better understand both sides of the issue and then take a decision.

He talks about having a open mind and hearing both sides of the story. I think that is great. To be able to be calm and objective and hear all sides to a story in a issue as important as climate change is a great attitude.

It will be interesting to see what he comes back with.

He writes more about this on his blog:

I think it is very important, being an elected person that I give both sides a chance to put their case forward so that I can make an informed decision on the Rudd Government’s proposed carbon reduction scheme that I will be asked to vote on in just under two weeks.

I am not a climate sceptic and I am not a climate change extremist. What I am, however, is someone that actually wants to take a balanced view, look at the facts and then respond appropriately, unlike the Greens.

As well as meeting with various scientists I will also be having high level talks with members of the Obama Administration on how they plan to deal with reducing carbon emissions.

I hope this will give me more information so I can chart a clear course in my mind for where Australia needs to head in reducing carbon emissions.

The Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs

Posted on
Reply

The Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs – BusinessWeek

No. 1 With 36% of the vote, online bookseller Better World Books led the pack. The 200-person company makes money selling books it gets for free from a network of individuals and institutions across the country. Co-founder Xavier Helgesen says the Mishawaka (Ind.)-based company has donated over $6 million to literacy programs and libraries around the world since it launched in 2002. “Right now, one out of seven people has the economic means to buy books from us,” he says. “If we can bring people up to levels of equivalent literacy, we’re helping our long-term business model.” Helgesen expects Better World, which has secured around $4 million in equity investment in total, to bring in $30 million in revenue this calendar year and be profitable in 2010. The company sells about 10,000 books a day.

Fundamental Theorem of ETS

Posted on
2

Australia and many countries are moving towards a emissions trading system for carbon. I have favoured carbon taxes to emissions trading for a while now.

Greg Mankiw puts this best.

Cap-and-trade = Carbon tax + Corporate welfare.

He gives the example from a NYtimes article to support this:

How did cap and trade, hatched as an academic theory in obscure economic journals half a century ago, become the policy of choice in the debate over how to slow the heating of the planet? And how did it come to eclipse the idea of simply slapping a tax on energy consumption that befouls the public square or leaves the nation hostage to foreign oil producers?

The answer is not to be found in the study of economics or environmental science, but in the realm where most policy debates are ultimately settled: politics. Many members of Congress remember the painful political lesson of 1993, when President Bill Clinton proposed a tax on all forms of energy, a plan that went down to defeat and helped take the Democratic majority in Congress down with it a year later.

Cap and trade, by contrast, is almost perfectly designed for the buying and selling of political support through the granting of valuable emissions permits to favor specific industries and even specific Congressional districts. That is precisely what is taking place now in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has used such concessions to patch together a Democratic majority to pass a far-reaching bill to regulate carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade plan.

The two things to add to this are:

  • Enough Tax: No government appears willing to impose a cost high enough to actually change behaviour.
  • To use the carbon tax dollars for solving greehouse gas issues or decreasing the tax in other areas.

Makiw gives an example of how political wrangling can change the composition of a ETS scheme.

From a Obama-Biden campaign position paper:
Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s cap-and-trade system will require all pollution credits to be auctioned. A 100 percent auction ensures that all large corporate polluters pay for every ton of emissions they release, rather than giving these emission rights away for free to coal and oil companies.


From today’s newspaper:
Under the House bill, only 15% of the emission permits will be auctioned initially. The rest of the permits will be given away — 2% to oil refiners, 5% to free-standing “merchant” coal plants, 9% to regulated natural-gas distributors, and so on.