Emissions Trading: Difference between revisions

It happens because a group of computer hackers found a way to get access to the certificates of serial companies. The article on Spiegel Online describes that the group steal the certificates of a company in the Czech Republic and sell their certificates to other companies. This is an actual example, which happens in January 2011.  <ref> ssu/Reuters. (2011, January 19). Sicherheitslücke: EU-Kommission stoppt Emissionshandel. Retrieved March 10, 2011, from http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/0,1518,740462,00.html </ref>

I think this actual example is a reason to have a lock on the thematic of this system and to find way out of it.

We see the results of the global warming every day. The climate chance is obvious for everybody. The average of temperature rises up and we get more and more extreme weather events. We have melting glaciers and polar bears which are melting and let rise the sea level. All those are consequences of the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, ozone and nitrous oxide. The global warming is cause by two groups, the man-made and the natural causes. Some of the natural causes are for example the methane gas from the arctic tundra and wetlands. This greenhouse gas traps heat in the atmosphere. A typical man made problem is the burning of fossil fuels in our transportation vehicles, houses, power plants and factories. Important fossil fuels made of organic matter are oil and coal. The burning of the fuels gives off much carbon dioxide into the earth´s atmosphere. Mining coal give off much methane into the atmosphere.

Another point important point which has been regulated in Kyoto was mechanisms like “Emissions Trading, the Clean Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation” <ref> Singhal, N., & Gupta, H. (2011). Carbon Credit Currency for the Future. In W. Leal Filho, The Economic, Social and Political Elements of Climate Change. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, p. 209. </ref>

So the determining of the permissible amount of emissions is a very important, not without controversy, part of the system, because if there are too much permissible emissions in the market we don’t stop the climate change and if there are not enough permissible emissions we cannot sustain our industrial sectors because of the international competition with other industrial regions in the world.

The basic principle of carbon markets is that companies have a limited right to emit greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The company can use these rights to emit itself or they sell their right and another company which has not enough emissions rights. At the consequence companies which have a very clean production can make additional money with the selling of their emissions rights. This is the central point where criminals see a way to make some money with the theft of emissions rights.

In the literature have carbon market the following definition in general:

And actual is the emission trading scheme is one of the important instruments of the European Union to reduce the greenhouse gasses by 8 percent. As in arrange in the Kyoto Protocol.

So the result of this distribution of emission units to the companies is the trading of these units between the several countries and companies. It a complex process which do not make it more transparent for interested people and citizens. And that maybe a key problem.

Allowance-Based Markets

And the major market of the unit it’s the European Union, because much of the greenhouse gases of the world is produced in Europe. So it makes sense to implement it first in this region and make it so to the model region which help to adopt such a system to other regions in the other continent of the world.  

Many articles criticize the trade system in general, because of the many lags and immature elements. Especially criticize them some projects of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Some of these projects don’t have proven benefits against the climate change. And so only some companies make money with the selling of the certificates but they do effectively nothing against the climate change.

The central criticism points I found during my research and during the case study writing process was the not really transparent trading system. So it was only a matter of time as criminals found a way to use weaknesses in the system to make money. I think it is impossible to create a hundred percent safety system. But at the moment we make it too easy to abuse the system. All in all we should not forget that an Emission Trading Scheme is a part of the economic market and should help reduce the climate change to sustain our environment. So it should not be depraved to a system to do illegal transactions.

Another relevant point is that it is not easy to find this group of criminals, because of the global dimension of the internet the can organize their theft from every location in the world where they get access to the internet and it´s another interesting point if only national organized police agencies can catch such global operating criminal organizations.

It is important to watch on the economical, social and environmental effects on people, countries and living perspectives of involved citizens. For example: workers who lost their workspace, because the factory closes in Europe and get transferred to another place and country in the world. They go in a country without any emissions regulation and lower labour costs and no participation on the factory management of the workers. In most of these Counties they don’t have established the same environmental protection as in European Countries. Furthermore the European Countries lost their purchasing power because they are from this point on only the consumer of the products and not the producer.

Another thing is that it is not easy to find the right topic and focus the case study on this topic. Many projects fail because the requirements are not really worked off. Finally I am not really sure if have get the right focus in my work. On one side will you bring many different views and aspect on the topic but on the other side do you get superficial and don’t show the profound information and show not enough details about the several arguments of the focused topic.

About the permission trading learned I that it’s not easy to implement such a system in a short time and to be sure that much of the factors has been concerned. As the theft of permissions show us can criminals find a way to use holes in the secure of the system to find a way to steal permission and sell them on the own account.

And also I get some experience about the using of a wiki system and the syntax which is needed to write articles.