Recently in Climate change Category

The gold business card -- that's gold, not gold-colored paper -- said it all about where the money is coming from for a new kind of gasification industry. The small but growing area is a fairly low-emission process that turns carbon feedstocks, mainly coal, into synthetic gas for multiple uses -- including turning power turbines -- without burning them. It is especially expected to take off in China, with that country's abundance of cash, coal and carbon dioxide emissions.

The card came out of the wallet of gasification entrepreneur Robert Walker, who said it came from a Chinese business contact.

Is it a little starter pistol signaling the start of a California carbon market rush? Impossible to know yet. But the Barclays Capital carbon allowance deal with NRG Power Marketing, announced Wednesday, reminds us that companies that have toiled to set themselves up for a lucrative US carbon market now have only California to look forward to.

Though market-optimist types think Congress sooner or later will enact a carbon trading program, they called it wrong in the case of the Congress just ending and have only the Golden State to bank on right now.

Not a great plan to start a piece with, "Back in the day ...," but two feisty statements from the Environmental Defense Fund today reminded us of some old times.

Yessir, in those days, the late 1980s and early '90s, EDF people were major, major players in developing the first cap-and-trade program, the Acid Rain Program that Congress created in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the Environmental Protection Agency then made reality in big meetings with environmental and industry experts. EDF experts then went on to start talking with utilities, that long ago, about market programs for carbon emissions. And it has often been on a different page from other environmental groups, taking a work-with-industry approach instead of confronting.

Now EDF may be ready to shift gears.

It's a blessing when someone gives you a perfectly good excuse to watch a chimp's antics on the Internet -- on work time. So thanks to the National Center for Public Policy Research, which introduced us today to the engaging "Dr. James Hansimian," the newest character in the anti-climate-change-activist drama.

The Economist sees a great deal riding on the success of the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate-energy bill effort -- with respect to the long-term power of different kinds of environmental activity.

The contemplated bill (details not yet apparent) would give power companies, natural gas, nuclear and other energy sources some certainty about how to plan for the next five, 10 years and more. But failure to pass it could mean a shift to the kind of environmental activism that does not play well with industry, the magazine says in an editorial:

The idea that electric companies wanted certainty about climate change law so they could get on with the business of planning and investing held some sway for the past year or so. But the state of the lawmaking right now appears to have prompted a change.

Now the uncertainty seems livable, at least to some. "We'd all like to have certainty. But bad certainty quick is not a good result," Southern Company chief executive David Ratcliffe told our colleague Cathy Cash yesterday. "I'll deal with the uncertainty rather than accept a bad bill."

Fresh off a value-added-tax scam involving carbon allowances and fraudulent deals that denied sales tax revenue to EU governments, the German Emissions Trading Authority discovered that computer hackers cracked codes and gained access to company EU Allowance accounts, enabling them to steal and sell EUAs into the EU Emissions Trading Scheme market.

According to Duke Energy's Jim Rogers, the greenhouse gas conversation among world business leaders at Davos last week took a turn much like the one Congress and President Obama took this month: It's all about jobs.

"A reframing of the issue" is how Rogers put it in an interview with forbes.com. "If you transform the energy sector, you stimulate the economy and you create jobs." And reduce emissions. Reframing indeed. Changing the subject, from climate change to jobs. Not a new element in the US climate-energy debate, but now in a newly important place: the driver's seat.

But from another perspective, RGGI was not a success, because the 200 or so power generators covered by the program were not really incentivized by it to reduce their emissions. The program's allowance prices were far too low to do that, effectively making the program this year more like a carbon tax.

Suddenly Copenhagen isn't a geek topic any more. It's all over radio and cable shows,  newspapers and blogs. If Americans still aren't pretty conscious of the climate change debates, they must be wearing some really good noise-canceling headphones.

Organizers registered 36,000 participants for a venue whose maximum capacity is 15,000, our colleague Gerry Karey tells us, and it accredited 5,000 journalists but will allow only (!)3,400 in at a time.

Sounds exciting, but also possibly dreadful. Still, interest groups are there by the hundred, working like mad to network and influence colleagues and policymakers. Some, like the American Public Power Association's attendee, are working almost as hard to document what they're doing.