Treaty hot air chills the carbon traders

THE Manhattan offices of Eco Securities were eerily empty last Thursday morning. Over the rows of unoccupied desks, two men could be seen peering out of the 19th-floor windows — a sight that might have aroused concern considering the company has been in the headlines recently for its plunging share price.

In his corner office, Bruce Usher, the London-listed firm’s chief executive, was quick to explain nothing untoward was about to happen. The staff members were looking for a hawk that had taken to perching on the floor above. The rest of his crew were off for the day to take part in Green Week — an annual eco-awareness jamboree — and were gathering up bottles for recycling.

Usually, Eco Securities staff are employed at the vanguard of another solution to the global ecological crisis. The company is the largest trader of carbon credits, a system established under the Kyoto protocol, the international agreement to tackle global warming, which aims to encourage free-market solutions to the problem.

Global warming is by definition a global problem, and Kyoto established the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a market for tradable credits that western companies can buy to meet their pollution requirements. These are then used to finance green schemes in the developing world.

The world is making ever more hot air. Trade in greenhouse gases, worth about ¤40 billion (£31 billion) last year, is expected to increase to ¤63 billion next year, according to Point Carbon, a market analyst. Most trading is done in London.

But while the principle of the CDM has taken off, policing the market has proved tricky and time-consuming for the market’s under-resourced watchdog, the United Nations. Meanwhile, Eco Securities and the rest of the industry have been hit by an ever-shifting maze of international legislation and byzantine discussions on the next stage of the world’s response to global warming. Eco Securities’ shares have fallen 70% this year.

“There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what is happening and it’s very frustrating,” said Usher.

Despite this, he stressed that the CDM works, and calculates that by 2012 the scheme will have reduced emissions of carbon dioxide by between one and two billion tonnes.

“The problem is that we are emitting 20 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. So in the next five years we are going to emit another 100 billion tonnes. CDM works but it’s just not enough,” he said.

Most of Usher’s problems now centre on the approval of schemes. The UN appoints local inspectors, companies known as designated operation entities, to sign off on the creditworthiness of green schemes.

But the auditors are so overloaded with schemes that Usher said: “You literally cannot book their time. We are having to book designated operation entities a year in advance.

“They are all over capacity. There are about 2,000 projects — we have 400 — and there are only a few of these companies. They simply don’t have the ability to deal with all these projects quickly,” he said.