Carbon Trading Scam

This one is easy: stay away, stay far away. This will be  the first casualty of the failure at Copenhagen. Even as the masses assembled, Denmark was marked with a huge scandal over fraud in carbon markets. The Danish scams were in the Billions of Kroner. Australia's Cap & Trade bill failed on the eve of the confab. Now, after the confab, the scams are being found more broadly, across Europe.

Organized crime may have skimmed an astounding 5B Euros ($7.4B).

This chart from the WSJ shows how carbon allowances have plunged post Copenhagen. To make carbon-free technologies like solar competitive, these allowances need to be above E60/tonne. It has fallen in half from a recent high of E25 to below E12.50.  Quite a drag, says the Silicon Valley cleantech press.

Since Copenhagen, it has gotten worse. In March 2010, the Chicago Climate Exchange has been going through record lows of 10c per tonne. Two carbon exchanges in Europe had to suspend trading when a new scandal emerged: some certificates of emission reduction had been illegally reused.