Per Bloomberg:
George W. Bush, who’s lately warmed to the notion that nations must cut greenhouse gases, has stopped short of endorsing mandatory caps. That hasn’t prevented the world’s biggest banks from plotting ways to eventually rake in winnings off emission limits in the U.S.
The banks are rushing to hire traders for the U.S., betting it will enact caps, combined with emissions permit trading, after Bush leaves office in January 2009. In the European Union, emissions trading tripled in value to $24 billion in 2006 from a year earlier, when the market started, World Bank figures show.
“The growth is phenomenal,” says Seb Walhain, who runs the world’s biggest emissions trading desk at Fortis, Belgium’s No. 1 bank. …
Europe’s cap and trade program provides incentives, through permit trading, for companies to reduce emissions such as carbon dioxide that cause global warming. Heavy polluters have to buy more emission permits when they exceed their cap, while cleaner companies profit by selling them.
Bush opposes these programs, which started with the United Nations’ 1997 Kyoto Protocol, citing costs to the U.S. economy of mandatory caps and China’s refusal to agree to them. In May, Bush called for a new round of global talks to set voluntary goals to curb global-warming gases.
Traders say a new U.S. president will reverse course and support cap and trade bills now in Congress.
“There’s been a change in sentiment in the U.S. favoring emissions trading,” says Richard Sandor, creator of U.S. Treasury futures at the Chicago Board of Trade and chairman of Isle of Man-based Climate Exchange Plc, which owns Europe’s biggest exchange for trading permits. …
As with every government program meddling with free enterprise, there will be some winners among all the losers.
And don’t worry; they’ll tell all the losers that the real winner is Mother Earth.
