Earth Equity News

Fraud Besets E.U. Carbon Trading System. By James Kanter, NYTimes, February 8, 2010. "Carbon Markets have had a rocky ride since trading began five years ago in the European Union. The latest bump came last month, when swindlers used faked e-mail messages to obtain access codes for individual accounts on national registries that make up the bloc's Emission Trading System. Traders and companies who fell for the ploy on Jan. 28 were directed to a rogue Web site and invited to enter their security codes -- a practice known as 'phishing' in the jargon of the Internet. The swindlers used the stolen codes to gain access to electronic certificates that represent quantities of greenhouse gases. They then sold the certificates through trading accounts registered in Denmark and Britain. The attack on the German national registry, which appears to have been among the hardest hit, could have netted the swindlers as much as $4 million... Matthew Cowie, a carbon markets expert at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research company, said the attack highlighted how 'people are recognizing that there are increasingly large amounts of money in this market and that these certificates represent real assets.'

"Other analysts said the attack had little to do with the underlying factors that will determine the future of carbon trading. According to Abyd Karmali, the global head of carbon markets for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, the biggest obstacle to the expansion of trading systems globally is the willingness of politicians to take the time to explain to voters that it will cost far less to curb climate change now than to deal with the problem later. Mr. Karmali acknowledged there was growing skepticism in the United States about carbon trading. But he said chances were still good that the United States would adopt such a system in the coming years. The participation of the United States and other major economies like Japan would create a global market that could be worth up to $3 trillion annually by 2020, compared with its current annual value of $130 billion, he said. Even the toughest critics of emissions markets agreed that the cyberattack was the least of their worries."