By JAMES KANTER
Published: April 1, 2010
The decline in industrial production because of the recession meant that emissions from most of the installations covered by the Union’s trading system dropped by 11.2 percent, according to Reuters.BRUSSELS — As the global economy faltered last year and factories idled, industries in the European Union benefited from one of the most lucrative outcomes of the recession: a huge excess of permits to emit carbon dioxide.
That would be the largest decline since the program began in 2005.
Analysts had predicted a drop of 10 to 11 percent.
Emissions from factories and power plants were 1.69 billion tons, according to an analysis by Bloomberg. But that covers only factories and power stations that have reported so far. The figures released Thursday cover at least 80 percent of the emissions from installations in the system.
The price of a ton of carbon dioxide on European markets had already fallen sharply in the past year because of the recession, and in early afternoon trading Thursday, prices were slightly lower at about €12.75, or $17.21.
The permits are traded on several exchanges throughout Europe, which dominates a global industry worth about $140 billion a year.
The price of carbon permits has been languishing around €13 apiece for some months, meaning that if a company were to exceed its emissions quota, it would need to pay €13 for each excess ton of carbon dioxide produced — a price that experts have said is far too low to result in a significant change in the way companies generate and use energy.
Analysts had warned against taking firm positions ahead of the announcement by the commission, because the data are released only once a year, rather than on a quarterly basis, and because of difficulties in estimating emissions during such a severe downturn.
The decline in 2009 was “uncharted territory” for carbon traders, warned Kjersti Ulset, the head of European carbon analysis for Point Carbon in Norway.
In particular, it was “unclear whether the relationship between production and emissions is the same in a growing industry sector as it is in a massively decreasing, in some cases even collapsing, one,” she said.
The prospect of the shortfall had led to calls earlier in the week by international climate officials to consider stiffening European targets.
The size of the shortfall could strengthen calls in the United States and Australia — which have not yet introduced national systems to control emissions — to try alternatives to trading, like a straightforward carbon tax.
The chief beneficiaries of the recession have been some of the Continent’s largest industrial companies, like the steel producer ArcelorMittal and the cement maker Lafarge, which received many of their permits for free from governments to help them meet the challenge of competition from parts of the world without such regulation.
Many of those companies have booked millions of euros from the sale of their excess credits, anticipating that they would have plenty in years to come, or because they needed to generate cash to shore up their balance sheets as the economic crisis bit deeper.
In many cases, those companies have also held on to some of their surplus, which will make it easier for them to offset future emissions once the economy recovers.
Defenders of the system say surpluses created by the economic collapse show that the system is working, by rewarding companies at times when they polluted less and by cutting them slack at a time of economic hardship.
But critics say the system is in danger of losing sight of its original purpose and becoming another form of corporate handout unless Europe orders deeper emissions cuts, requiring companies to use up their surplus permits and invest more in clean technology and efficiency.
Yvo de Boer, the U.N. climate change chief, said during a telephone conference Wednesday that surpluses of permits in the European system since 2005 “had allowed businesses to get used to the emissions trading scheme without immediately being under a huge constraint.”
Mr. De Boer said the decline in prices mostly reflected the severity of the recession, rather than problems with the design of the system. But he also suggested that Union governments now had the opportunity to make the system far more effective by agreeing to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2020, as some countries have advocated, compared with the current agreed level of 20 percent.
Commenting on the possibility of a higher target, the Union’s climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, said Wednesday that she was “now analyzing costs, potentials and co-benefits” in going to 30 percent. “To achieve a 20 percent reduction by 2020 is not nearly as ambitious today as it was two years back before the crisis,” Ms. Hedegaard wrote in an e-mail message.
Mr. de Boer said another factor that might have been depressing prices of the permits was the failure by governments meeting in Copenhagen in December to agree on a timetable for a binding global agreement to curb climate change, which traders say has cut the momentum. Mr. De Boer said reaching such a deal would now probably take until the end of 2011 — two years later than originally envisioned.
The main idea behind carbon trading was to give companies the incentive to reduce emissions by requiring the heaviest polluters to buy additional pollution permits. As a cap on the number of permits steadily tightened, companies that invested in greener production would be best placed to continue competing in a low-carbon economy of the future.
That goal was undermined four years ago when the price of carbon permits lost nearly all of their value in the European Union. Governments had handed out too many of the permits to powerful industries that had lobbied successfully for more than they needed.
Then last year, the environmental goals of the Union’s system were sidelined again by the worst economic slowdown in a generation, which cut industrial production in the 27-nation bloc.
Although prices of carbon permits already have weakened considerably because of the recession, analysts said the permits were not expected to lose almost all of their value again, as they did in 2006, because companies could bank the permits for future use unlike in previous years, reflecting a change in the rules.
Union governments have committed to keeping the system going until at least 2020. That should ensure there is eventually a shortfall of permits as the overall cap tightens and the Union authorities restrict the distribution of free permits in future.
For the moment, however, many companies are profiting from their surpluses.
Lafarge earned €142 million from selling permits in 2009, according to the company’s annual report. That figure is almost double the €85 million that Lafarge made from selling permits in 2008.
The money “allowed us to further invest into R.&D. programs and improve the environmental performance of our plants,” a company spokeswoman, Claire Mathieu, said, referring to research and development.
The number of permits Lafarge will end up holding in 2010 also “should exceed our needs,” the company said in its annual report.
ArcelorMittal has earned $108 million from selling permits since 2007, according to its annual report for 2009. The company specified that it had purchased the permits it sold, but it gave no further details about its trading strategies.
The company has no plans to continue selling permits, “since we may need them in the future” to cover the costs of pollution, said Jean Lasar, a spokesman. “However, if we do sell any carbon credits, the proceeds will be invested in energy-saving projects to improve our long-term carbon footprint.”
ArcelorMittal did not disclose how many excess permits the company currently held, or had invested with banks.
Most big companies in the cement and steel sectors had generated surpluses of permits each year since the start of the European system in 2005, according to Cédric Bleuez, the managing director of Carbon Market Data, a research company with headquarters in Britain and France.
That trend concerns critics like Bryony Worthington, the director of Sandbag, a nonprofit group based in London that is campaigning to make carbon trading more effective. Cap-and-trade in Europe “has become a kind of subsidy scheme for companies feeling economic distress, and that was not the original idea at all,” she said.
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