Carbon: Archive
Getting REDD Ready to Cross the Finish Line
March 8, 2010 Comment
It's hard to imagine with all the progress REDD has achieved, that it all started less than 20 years ago with the Rio Summit in '92, when the makings of a global sustainability architecture in the form of a climate treaty began to take shape. But a forestry treaty had yet to happen.
The Copenhagen Prediction Market
December 15, 2009 Comment
Got predictions on the outcome of COP15? Ready to put your (experimental) money where your mouth is? If yes, drop your thoughts in The Copenhagen Prediction Market.During the COP15 conference, the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets (CEEM) with sponsorship...
Mapping REDD Risks and Rewards: the Forest Carbon Index
December 6, 2009 Comment
A picture is worth a thousand words, and Resources for the Future's (RFF) new Forest Carbon Index (FCI) uses interactive maps to tell a visual story of forest carbon's global investment potential. Pretty useful stuff, considering that forest carbon's profit potential, stocks and policy hurdles are - like forest resources themselves - entirely place-based.
In Defense of Offsets
November 27, 2009 1 Comment
"Paying more for flights eases guilt, not emissions." This catchy title of a recent New York Times article reflects the stance of many organizations that recently decided to scrap programs offering carbon offsets for travel-related emissions. Responsible Travel, Yahoo, and the US House of Representatives are just a few groups that have terminated offset-purchase programs this year, determining that their money was better spent on in-house reduction efforts.
Can peat turn REDD in Copenhagen?
November 6, 2009 1 Comment
Destruction of peatland accounts for up to 50% of Indonesia's greenhouse gas emissions, and was a central theme at a recent conference sponsored by Germany's Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (Society for Technical Cooperation, GTZ). EM's Unna Chokkalingam attended the event, and filed this report.
Kerry-Boxer: Is This the Big One?
October 8, 2009 8 Comments
It has been a while since I last blogged... so long and so many things have happened that deserve mention, that I don't know where to start. But let's not bury the lead, the main story these days is the recently released Kerry-Boxer bill, also known as the "Clean Energy, Jobs, and American Power Act" (whose horrible acronym, CEJAPA, was the subject of much twittering last week. Kudos to Cantor CO2e, by the way, for snagging the CEJAPA URL... Hope it is worth it). I would say that it is the bill that we've all been waiting for, except that I'm not entirely sure it is.
Voluntary Carbon Meets Big Business
October 1, 2009 Comment
Last week, representatives from EcoSeucrities, ClimateBiz, and Baker and McKenzie met in New York for the launch of The Carbon Management and Offsetting Trends Survey 2009. The publicly available report surveyed corporate offset buyers for an insider's look at attitudes towards the voluntary carbon market. Sound familiar? Ecosystem Marketplace's annual report State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets, produced in partnership with New Carbon Finance, asks some of the same questions to the supply (rather than demand) side of the market. To find out if buyers and sellers are singing the same tune, we decided to compare the two reports.
New Study: Willingness to Pay for Offsets
September 17, 2009 Comment
How much are you willing to cough up to offset harmful emissions from air travel? And what can policymakers do to make you pay more? Call me a nerd, but these questions have plagued me for months. After many hours of reading, writing, and number crunching, I am pleased to put forward my best responses in the form of my Economics Thesis from Barnard College, Columbia University: "Willingness to Pay for Opt-In Offsets in the Voluntary Carbon Market."
Water quality markets: a slippery slope towards carbon trading?
September 4, 2009 Comment
The Ohio River Basin Trading Pilot Project, managed by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), held its third quarter webcast last month. The publicly available webcast covered a whole slew of updates, from an overview of WARMF modeling to project funding developments. One such update turned quite a few heads: EPRI's progress towards using a water quality market to also generate voluntary carbon credits.
Chinese Offset Consumption
August 31, 2009 3 Comments
This summer, the Shanghai- based Tianping Auto Insurance company turned several carbon market stakeholder heads by voluntarily purchasing 8,026 verified emissions reductions (VERs). Chinese companies supply more emission reduction credits than companies in any other nation, but not surprisingly have...
Update: New REDD Text TONIGHT!!!
August 13, 2009 Comment
New REDD Text by Friday
August 12, 2009 Comment
Zen in the Art of Reduced Emissions from Fossil Fuels
August 7, 2009 5 Comments
Who's afraid of the big, bad farm lobby?
August 6, 2009 Comment
So Right, and yet So Wrong...
July 3, 2009 Comment
It Passed... Now What?
June 30, 2009 Comment
REDD in Copenhagen -- an update
June 23, 2009 Comment
Down On the Farm...
June 22, 2009 3 Comments
A Pioneer up for Grabs
June 15, 2009 Comment
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