Cap and trade schemes place a limit on industry emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide, introducing a growing global trade in carbon permits worth $64 billion last year.

Those limits are legally binding, and so underpin long-term demand for these new commodities and inject price certainty which looks attractive during a global stocks sell-off.

But the market's relative novelty and complex regulatory framework are deterring a wave of investment for now.

Read rest…

A professor at a state university has copied me on a note about Greenpeace tactics likely already also playing out on a campus near you. Here is an email from the school’s provost about this "student" group with details removed:

A "student" called me this afternoon asking if she could speak to my class for 5 minutes about global warming (Oct. 13th-21st). It is part of Greenpeace's Project Hotseat. The intent is "to pressure representatives on global warming," in particular [POLITICIAN], partly by getting students to attend a "big event" on the 23rd which will be aerial-photographed. I learned the following upon asking for more details.

Yesterday’s E&E News PM (subscription) has an interesting article about a new poll out on U.S. view of climate change, sponsored by a set of environmental groups and consultants.

It supports many arguments that we have made here at Prometheus, such as the fact that support for action on climate change is broad but shallow, the public generally accepts a significant human role in climate change, and Al Gore has played a big role in making the issue partisan (an even more interesting finding because Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection is a sponsor of the poll).

I don’t have the poll yet, but have requested it. Meantime, here is an excerpt from the E&E News PM story:

Speaking today to Houston business leaders, renowned climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer said that new data collected from NASA satellites show that there are significant errors in the climate models used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Dr. Spencer – published author, principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite – presented his latest climate research at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Global Warming Policy Breakfast this morning at the Houston City Club.

The IPCC science is the driver behind national and international programs to mandate reduction of carbon dioxide. “The major climate models used by global warming advocates all assume a far greater sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide changes than what we observe in the empirical satellite data,” Dr. Spencer said. “That’s why all of these scenarios produce such outlandishly high forecasts about future global temperatures.”

Greenpeace boards ship to protest coal-burning plants in Spain

Greenpeace activists boarded a cargo ship carrying Colombian coal at a port in northern Spain yesterday to protest Spain's reliance on the highly polluting energy source. The four activists painted "Quit Coal" in English and Spanish on the side of the Windsor Adventure, which was transporting 54,000 tonnes of coal. "The message from today's action is simple: to tackle climate change, Europe needs to end its outdated dependency on coal," said Agnes de Rooij, a Greenpeace member. The action comes as the European Parliament is set to vote tomorrow on the bloc's response to climate change. Greenpeace wants the EU to block building more than 50 new coal-fired plants in Europe.

Source

Governments need to review urgently their policies on growing crops for biofuels, UN food chiefs have warned.

In its annual report, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) called for rich countries to remove subsidies to allow poorer nations to compete.

It said biofuels were of "limited use" for solving the planet's energy needs.

But the report said using crops such as sugar, maize and oilseeds as liquid biofuels would continue to push up food prices over the next decade.

Challenge

"Biofuels present both opportunities and risks. The outcome would depend on the specific context of the country and the policies adopted," said FAO chief Jacques Diouf.

An indecisive eight per cent felt guilty enough about their flight to book into an environmentally-friendly hotel, while just four per cent stoically refused to go abroad because of the issue.

Hysteria over global warming has opened the door to restrictive energy policies that greatly jeopardize not only average Americans but also low income families in developing countries who are already beset by rising prices, according a new documentary on the modern environmental movement  

"Not Evil, Just Wrong" (http://www.noteviljustwrong.com/)

takes a hard look at the potential human costs associated with the demands of environmentalism in areas of the world where carbon-based energy sources are vital. The current scare surrounding man-made global warming theories should be viewed within a larger historical context that reaches back to the early 1960s when Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring," which argued against the use of pesticides like DDT (Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane).

AUSTRALIANS are getting bored with climate change, and many still doubt whether it is actually happening, a new survey has revealed.

Only 46 per cent of Australians said they would take action on climate change if they were in charge of making decisions for Australia, a dip from 55 per cent last year, according to the Ipsos-Eureka Social Research Institute's third annual climate change survey.

And almost one in 10 Australians (nine per cent) strongly agreed with the statement "I have serious doubts about whether climate change is occurring". A further 23 per cent agreed to some extent.

Ipsos-Eureka director of Sustainable Communities and Environment Unit Jasmine Hoye believes Australians are becoming more concerned with other environmental issues that they can have more direct control over.

Excerpt: Gore attributed the historic floods that devastated Iowa in June to man-made emissions causing more water to evaporate from oceans, increasing average humidity worldwide. “In 66 of your 99 counties, the flood damage was truly historic.” Gore told the crowd of 1,000 Democratic donors. “No one has ever seen a flood like this.”

Gore also blamed climate change for increased tornadoes, including the one that leveled much of Parkersburg earlier this year. “Yes, we’ve always had tornadoes in Iowa and in Tennessee,” he said. “But they’re coming more frequently and they’re stronger.” Des Moines Register

Note: Gore has absolutely no scientific backing for these claims: See below inconvenient studies: