Tag Archives: canadian

This giant Canadian mine spill doesn’t make us feel good about Alaska’s Pebble Mine

by CerysGollan Posted on August 8, 2014

The Fault Is Mine

This giant Canadian mine spill doesn’t make us feel good about Alaska’s Pebble Mine

By

Reuters

Well, damn. If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, my swear jar just got full enough to send all of the Duggar kids to college.

The photo above shows the results of a copper and gold mine tailings pond spitting more than 10 million cubic meters of discharge into nearby creeks and lakes.

It doesn’t just look ugly. The Monday spill could contain “unknown levels of arsenic, mercury, lead, copper and cadmium, among other toxins and heavy metals.” And the Mount Polley spill is threatening an important salmon spawning ground. Al Jazeera reports:

The contaminated water and debris flowed into a local creek, expanding its width from 4 feet to 150 feet, the ministry’s release said, before entering nearby Quesnel Lake — where many salmon are expected to arrive for their annual spawning in the coming weeks. …

Quesnel Lake and its connected waterways are important habitats for Chinook and Sockeye Salmon, as well as Rainbow Trout and White Sturgeon — an ancient species that can live for more than 100 years and is considered “endangered” by U.S. standards or “critically imperiled” in B.C.

This Canadian spill adds more fuel to the fire for critics of the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska. The controversial copper mine is planned for a site near the productive Bristol Bay wild salmon fishery. It would be about 10 times the size of Imperial Metals’ Mount Polley mine, NRDC’s Joel Reynolds points out. And the same company that provided designs for the failed B.C. tailings pond was also involved in pushing for Pebble Mine. From Knight Piesold Consulting’s comments on the EPA’s 2012 draft Bristol Bay watershed assessment:

[T]he assessment report is based on a fundamentally flawed premise that considers that a faulty mine design, inadequate mine development, and inappropriate mine operations would be permitted to occur within the state of Alaska.

Oh, phew. For a minute there we were worried, and then we remembered faulty mines are only built in Canada, not the good ol’ U.S. of A. See, here’s Imperial Metals President Brian Kynoch at a news conference on the Mount Polley breach: “If you asked me two weeks ago if this could have happened, I would have said it couldn’t.”

Fuck.


Source
Salmon run threatened by ‘unprecedented’ British Columbia mining spill, Al Jazeera

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This giant Canadian mine spill doesn’t make us feel good about Alaska’s Pebble Mine

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Koch brothers get rolling on their first tar-sands project

by ColumbusReilly Posted on May 27, 2014

Koch brothers get rolling on their first tar-sands project

By

Jared Rodriguez / Truthout

The Koch brothers are currently right on track to become the most dangerous senior citizens in the North American nonrenewable energy game. Considering that that particular arena is currently dominated – as are most lucrative yet morally fraught industries – by white men with Cialis prescriptions, that’s saying something.

In March, it was revealed that Chuck and Dave had quietly acquired leases for between 1.1 and 2 million acres of tar-sands land in Alberta. That makes them one of the largest tar-sands leaseholders in Canada. “Maybe they were planning on converting that property into a lovely nature preserve,” said exactly no one. Surprise, no one! Koch Industries’ Canadian arm, Koch Oil Sands Operating LLC, has started to make arrangements to drill on that land.

The project, slated to begin construction in 2016, is expected to cost $2.2 billion, and would produce 60,000 barrels of tar-sands oil per day starting in 2018.

And that’s just the start. Roxanne Rees, media representative for Koch Oil Sands, confirmed to the Vancouver Observer that the company has other projects in nascent stages of development.

Canada, we are truly sorry to share one of our national plagues with you. And for every moron who may be thinking otherwise: Charles and David Koch are significantly worse than Justin Bieber, Avril Lavigne, and Chad Kroeger combined, so this does not make us even.


Source
Koch brothers’ company files to develop oil sands project, The Globe and Mail
Koch brothers’ Canadian company moves to exploit oil sands gold rush, Vancouver Observer

Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.

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Koch brothers get rolling on their first tar-sands project

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Pipeline builder says oil spills can be good for the economy

by Julie Plunkett Posted on May 5, 2014

It’s dirty work, but …

Pipeline builder says oil spills can be good for the economy

By

Mic Stolz

Kinder Morgan’s idea of job creation.

Kinder Morgan wants to spend $5.4 billion tripling the capacity of an oil pipeline between the tar sands of Alberta and the Vancouver, B.C., area. Yes, the company acknowledges, there’s always the chance of a “large pipeline spill.” But it says the “probability” of such an accident is “low.” And anyway, if a spill does happen, it could be an economic boon.

“Spill response and cleanup” after oil pipeline ruptures, such as the emergency operations near Kalamazoo, Mich., in 2010 and in the Arkansas community of Mayflower last year, create “business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions, and cleanup service providers,” the company argues.

Those aren’t the outrageous comments of a company executive shooting off his mouth while a reporter happened to be neaby. Those are quotes taken from an official document provided to the Canadian government in support of the company’s efforts to expand its pipeline.

It’s a bit like claiming cancer caused by nuclear accidents can be great because it provides work for oncologists. Here’s more from The Vancouver Sun:

“Pipeline spills can have both positive and negative effects on local and regional economies, both in the short- and long-term,” the company states in its submission to the National Energy Board, the federal government’s Calgary-based regulatory agency. …

The New Democratic Party MP who represents Burnaby, including the Westridge Marine Terminal where large tankers will arrive to carry diluted bitumen overseas, accused the company of insensitivity.

“We know Kinder Morgan is using every trick in the book to push this pipeline through our community, but this takes the cake — proposing that a spill would actually be good for the local economy,” said Kennedy Stewart, MP for Burnaby-Douglas riding. “This assertion shows the utter disregard this company has for British Columbians.”

The company said it was just fulfilling its regulatory requirements.

The company’s submission also says the ecological impacts of an oil spill, such as on beavers and otters, would be “potentially high.” Perhaps cleanup companies just need to find a way to put wildlife to work.


Source
Kinder Morgan pipeline application says oil spills can have both negative and positive effects, The Vancouver Sun

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Pipeline builder says oil spills can be good for the economy

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No, New York Times, Keystone XL Is Not a "Rounding Error"

by slodka_elkra Posted on April 25, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Tim McDonnell

The New York Times had an interesting story earlier this week that aimed to put the carbon footprint of the Keystone XL pipeline, widely derided by environmentalists as the coup de grâce for climate change, in a broader context. The main takeaway was that even if the pipeline gets built, the carbon emissions from the oil it will carry will be such a small slice of the global pie as to be practically negligible; one analyst quoted in the story dismisses Keystone’s carbon footprint as a “rounding error.”

The story is right about a couple things: For the Obama administration to take a strong stance on climate change, finalizing and enforcing tough new limits on emissions from cars and coal-fired power plants will likely have a much bigger impact than blocking this one pipeline (a final decision on the pipeline was delayed once again by the State Department last Friday). And in any case, according to the State Department’s latest environmental assessment, most of the Canadian oil that the pipe would carry is going to get dug up and burned one way or another, so blocking the pipeline won’t necessarily be a win for the climate.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that, as the chart above shows, the footprint of this one infrastructure project is much less than that of the entire US economy. But that doesn’t mean we should write off all that oil’s carbon footprint altogether. In fact, the Times story’s own such chart dramatically understates what that footprint will really be, using a statistic out of context that’s an order of magnitude lower than the latest official estimate.

The Times writes that the pipeline will be responsible for an annual 18.7 million metric tons of emissions, citing a 2013 letter from a top EPA administrator to senior State Department officials offering feedback on their environmental review of the pipeline. But in the letter, that figure isn’t presented as an estimate of the pipeline’s total footprint. Instead, it’s an estimate of how much greater the emissions will be as a result of the pipeline carrying oil sands crude, the exceptionally carbon-heavy oil that will run in the pipe, as opposed to an equivalent volume of conventional crude oil.

In other words, 18.7 million metric tons is only the difference between conventional and oil sands oil, the extra carbon boost that comes from using a dirtier fossil fuel, what the EPA letter calls “incremental emissions.”

The real number to look at is from the State Department’s final environmental analysis (last paragraph on page ES-15) released in January, and it’s much higher. According to that report, over its full lifecycle (from production to refinement to burning) the oil carried by the pipeline will emit 147-168 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually—more than the whole nation of Pakistan, according to Energy Information Administration statistics, and about as much as 41 coal-fired power plants.

The Times analysis is also problematic because it makes an erroneous apples-to-oranges comparison between country-level emissions data from the Energy Information Administration that counts only carbon dioxide, and Keystone emissions estimates that are given in terms of “carbon dioxide equivalent” and thus count other greenhouse gases like methane (although CO2 still accounts for the lion’s share). For a better apples-to-apples comparison, I only included the US in my chart (and not the other nations included in the Times chart), because an official estimate of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions is only available for that country.

Although even the State Department Keystone estimate is a small-ish chunk of total US emissions, it’s certainly nothing to sneeze at, especially when President Obama has repeatedly linked approval of the pipeline to a finding that it won’t have a major impact on climate change.

From:

No, New York Times, Keystone XL Is Not a "Rounding Error"

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Mexican gangs learn that lime pays (also crime)

by LYZPhiltyouwwfc Posted on March 27, 2014

Grocery cartel

Mexican gangs learn that lime pays (also crime)

By

Shutterstock

“I could just kill for a margarita right now,” you sigh, apparently ignorant of the fact that it is March, and the consumption of an iced beverage is nothing short of an act of insanity. It’s also probably the middle of the workday, so that in itself should be cause for concern in most circles.

You’re also probably unaware that someone may have actually killed – as in, committed murder – for the limes that go in your hypothetical margarita. Cartels are invading the Mexican citrus trade, hijacking trucks, and forcibly taking over farms to sell the now-valuable fruit. Another day, another ring of organized criminals making the transition from eight balls to tasty treats!

NPR reports that unprecedented rainfall in the states of Michoacán, Guerrero, and Veracruz and a widespread bacterial infection in the state of Colima have resulted in minimal lime yields this year. As a result, farmers can charge a high price for their harvest, no matter the quality.

The demand for delicious citrus fruit has not escaped the attention of former Mexican drug lords. Canadian CBC News reports that the Knights Templar (Caballeros Templarios) cartel, an offshoot of the defunct but infamously brutal La Familia Michoacana, has been forcing farmers in the Tierra Caliente region to pay “protection taxes” to the cartel, which drive up lime prices even further. In some cases, the Knights Templar will seize citrus farms and take over production, sometimes killing farmers in the process. And according to NPR, lime producers are starting to hire security details to protect shipments of limes from organized hijackers at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Knights Templar have been active in the region for years preceding this lime crisis, but it’s only provided further opportunity for them to profit. Organized crime in the Tierra Caliente region, which includes parts of Michoacán and Guerrero, has wreaked havoc on its agriculture. A recent evaluation by the National Chamber of Business, Services, and Tourism of Apatzingán, a central city in the Tierra Caliente valley, showed that the cost of restoring the local citrus farming industry alone would exceed $130 million (link in Spanish).

Raúl Millan of Vision Import Group expressed surprise to NPR that customers are still buying up limes at prices that are double or triple what they normally are. Have you ever tried to separate the average American from her guac, Raúl? Come on. You know better.


Source
In Mexico And U.S., Lime Lovers Feel Squeezed By High Prices, NPR
Mexican drug cartel behind increase in lime prices, CBC News

Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.

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Mexican gangs learn that lime pays (also crime)

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The Brothers Koch quietly become largest tar-sands lease holders in Alberta (UPDATED)

by MicaelaL71 Posted on March 21, 2014

The Brothers Koch quietly become largest tar-sands lease holders in Alberta (UPDATED)

By

Shutterstock

UPDATE: It looks like Steve Mufson and Juliet Eilperin, the authors of the Washington Post article upon which this post was based, are backing down on their claims — sort of. The Koch brothers have leases on a confirmed 1.1 million acres of Alberta tar sands, and the article’s authors cite unnamed “industry sources we consider highly authoritative” who estimate that amount of land to be closer to two million acres. Mufson and Eilperin claim that if the latter figure is accurate, the Koch brothers are indeed the largest lease-holders in the region. However, Jonathan Adler, a columnist for the Washington Post, indicates that it’s possible that Canadian Natural Resources holds leases on 2.5 million acres of tar-sands land, which would exceed even the Kochs’ theoretical holdings.

You can read Mufson and Eilperin’s fairly half-hearted mea culpa here, and Adler’s response to the original article here.

Charles and David Koch sure are a busy coupla pranksters! In the 2012 election, the Mark and Donnie Wahlberg of modern-day American capitalism spent more than $412 million trying (and largely failing) to get their favorite candidates elected. And they’re gearing up to drop some cash on this year’s elections too.

But fossil-fuel-loving politicians aren’t the only item in the Koch shopping cart. Turns out the wacky sibling duo has spent the past dozen years throwing substantial bills at tar-sands property in Alberta – enough to buy leases on 1.1 million acres worth, to be exact.

That makes Koch Industries the single largest tar-sands lease holder in the province, ranking ahead of energy giants Conoco Phillips and Shell. As a point of reference, Alberta has the third largest crude oil reserves in the world, second only to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.

So what might this mean for the Keystone XL debate? As it happens, not that much. From The Washington Post:

The finding about the Koch acreage is likely to inflame the already contentious debate about the Keystone XL Pipeline and spur activists and environmentalists seeking to slow or stop planned expansions of production from the northern Alberta oil sands, or tar sands. Environmental groups have already made opposing the pipeline their leading cause this spring and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has called the Koch brothers Charles and David “un-American” and “shadowy billionaires.”

The link between Koch and Keystone XL is, however, indirect at best. Koch’s oil production in northern Alberta is “negligible,” according to industry sources and quarterly publications of the provincial government. Moreover, Koch has not reserved any space in the Keystone XL pipeline, a process that usually takes place before a pipeline is built.  The pipeline also does not run anywhere near Koch’s refining facilities. And TransCanada, owner of the Keystone routes, says Koch is not expected to be one of the pipeline’s customers.

However, as such a large stakeholder in the region, Koch Industries could stand to profit from Keystone XL because it’s expected to lower transportation costs, pushing other pipelines and rail companies to reduce their prices to stay in the oil-shipping game.

Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held company in the United States with annual revenues of $115 billion, is renowned for both its secrecy and the diversity of its holdings. Next on the company’s agenda? Sky’s the limit! They’re all over the place! By the time you get home tonight, there’s a chance that they may have acquired all of your shoes, but you probably won’t find out about it for another 12 years.


Source
The biggest lease holder in Canada’s oil sands isn’t Exxon Mobil or Chevron. It’s the Koch brothers., The Washington Post

Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.

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The Brothers Koch quietly become largest tar-sands lease holders in Alberta (UPDATED)

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Illinois petcoke rules coming, but not as fast as governor wants

by TerryQnhtwe Posted on January 25, 2014

Illinois petcoke rules coming, but not as fast as governor wants

By

Josh Mogerman

Last month, Chicago proposed rules that would crack down on big, filthy, uncovered piles of petroleum coke , or “petcoke.” Now the state of Illinois is following suit, though its process isn’t moving along as quickly as Gov. Pat Quinn (D) had been hoping.

Residents of Chicago’s Southeast Side have been complaining for months about looming deposits of petcoke, a byproduct that piles up as refineries process growing amounts of Canadian tar-sands oil. The petcoke blows up from piles along the Calamut River and contaminates nearby homes and neighborhoods, spurring worries about health problems.

As the Associated Press reports, “Quinn proposed rules last week to require terminals that store the petcoke to immediately install dust-suppression systems and prevent storm water runoff. He also wanted operators of petcoke and coal terminals throughout Illinois to fully enclose piles within two years.” And he told the Illinois Pollution Control Board that he wanted these requirements pushed through as emergency rules.

Unsurprisingly, the companies that would like to continue lazily adding to their uncovered petcoke piles cried foul. “The Emergency Rulemaking does not meet the legal standard of ‘emergency,’” wrote attorneys for Kinder Morgan Terminals in a filing opposing the new state rules. “The Board is not permitted to bypass the regular rulemaking procedures unless a true emergency situation exists.”

This week, the pollution control board sided with the polluters. From the AP again:

An Illinois pollution panel on Thursday rejected proposed emergency rules to control piles of petroleum coke along Chicago shipping channels, saying Gov. Pat Quinn and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency failed to prove there was an imminent threat to public health and safety. …

[I]ndustry officials called Quinn’s action “regulatory overreach” because Chicago’s health department and aldermen already have proposed rules and petcoke handlers have taken steps to prevent the material from blowing around again. Plus, at least one handler already has said it’s willing to build structures to enclose its piles.

Oh, well, if a single handler claims it is willing to voluntarily enclose its nasty piles, then there’s really no emergency — and no need for any new rules. Right?


Source
Pollution board denies Quinn’s petcoke regulations, The Associated Press

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Illinois petcoke rules coming, but not as fast as governor wants

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U.S. and Canadian safety officials are freaked out about exploding trains

by MaritaMontefior Posted on January 24, 2014

U.S. and Canadian safety officials are freaked out about exploding trains

By

PHMSA

This is what federal transportation safety officials from both the U.S. and Canada sounded like on Thursday: “Aaahhhh holy crap trains are exploding all over the place!”

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada issued simultaneous pleas to regulators on Thursday, calling for urgent reforms amid the spiraling spate of fiery accidents involving oil-hauling trains. Such trains have been exploding in flames and spilling their loads following derailments on the continent’s aging train tracks. Just this week, a train pulling six cars of oil derailed on a Philadelphia bridge, though fortunately there was no fire or oil spill.  

The New York Times explains the reforms that the safety officials are calling for:

According to these recommendations, oil carried on trains should be treated the same way as other dangerous materials like explosives or toxic materials. In those cases, rail carriers perform a more detailed security and safety analysis and look for alternative routes to avoid highly populated areas, iconic buildings, landmarks or environmentally sensitive regions.

Railroads should also be required to develop spill-response plans similar to those that are required from pipeline operators, the recommendations said. Those plans would help emergency workers and could help reduce the impact of any spill. In addition, the safety officials also recommended making sure that hazardous cargo was properly classified. Investigators looking into the Lac-Mégantic accident found that the crude oil in transit had been mislabeled into a less hazardous category. …

Safety officials in both countries also repeated their warnings about the type of tank cars, known as DOT-111s in the United States, that are used to carry crude oil and ethanol. Past investigations found that these tank cars do not provide sufficient protections in case of derailment and are prone to break or puncture too easily.

Absent from the recommendations was the most obvious step we could take: Stop fracking for oil!

The NTSB says crude oil shipments by rail have increased more than four-fold since 2005. It said in a press release that it’s “concerned that major loss of life, property damage and environmental consequences” can happen “when large volumes of crude oil or other flammable liquids are transported on a single train” that crashes or jumps the tracks.

“The large-scale shipment of crude oil by rail simply didn’t exist ten years ago, and our safety regulations need to catch up with this new reality,” NTSB Chair Deborah Hersman said in the statement. “While this energy boom is good for business, the people and the environment along rail corridors must be protected from harm.”

More from the Toronto Globe and Mail:

[Hersman’s] fears were echoed by her Canadian counterpart Wendy Tadros, chair of the Transportation Safety Board, who warned an Ottawa news conference Thursday about serious safety concerns linked to the “staggering” increase in crude shipped on the rails. New safety measures are needed to keep the communities located along rail lines safe, she said. The TSB issued its warning as part of a continuing investigation into the Lac-Mégantic crude-oil rail disaster, which killed 47 people last summer.

Hersman told the Times that “we’ve had a lot of talk” so far about safety reforms for trains that carry oil. “We need to see action.”

See also: Oil spillage from freight trains hit record high in 2013


Source
U.S. and Canada Urge New Safety Rules for Crude Oil Rail Shipments, The New York Times
Canadian and U.S. safety watchdogs warn of oil-by-rail’s risks in push for tighter rules, The Globe and Mail

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Canada sued over approval of “toxic” GMO salmon

by Garland36G Posted on January 21, 2014

Canada sued over approval of “toxic” GMO salmon

By

Shutterstock

Canadian officials ventured into uncharted legal and ecological waters when they approved the cultivation and export of genetically engineered salmon eggs last year. And now environmental groups have sued the government, claiming the approval illegally disregarded the potential for the transgenic fish to become an invasive species.

Quick background: AquaBounty Technologies Inc. has developed Atlantic salmon that grow more quickly than their natural cousins, thanks to the presence of DNA from Chinook salmon and from an eel-like fish called the ocean pout. The company wants to cultivate eggs for this AquAdvantage salmon on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, hatch the eggs and grow the salmon in Panama, then export the meat to the U.S. Approval from the U.S. government is still pending.

Some environmentalists worry that the GMO fish will escape, breed, and outcompete wild species. Under Canadian law, an invasive species can be defined as “toxic” in the environment. Three Canadian nonprofits are claiming that definition of “toxic” could apply to the AquAdvantage salmon and their eggs. Here’s the crux of their legal argument, as described by Global News:

“Our concern is basically, we don’t think they’ve done the due diligence to assess the toxicity of the eggs,” said Susanna Fuller, marine conservation coordinator with the [Ecology Action Centre].

“There is no evidence that the ministers, as part of their Section 108 Toxicity Assessment, considered any data from a test conducted to determine AquAdvantage salmon’s pathogenicity, toxicity or invasiveness as required under paragraph 5(a) of Schedule 5 of the Regulations,” reads the notice of application.

Fuller is also concerned about the lack of public consultation.

Environmentalists in the U.S., where the federal government could approve the sale of the GMO salmon this year, have been quick to voice their support for the legal challenge up north. “This case is an important step in preserving native salmon populations and the environment from an unwanted, untested, novel threat,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director for Center for Food Safety. “The short-sighted and unlawful approval by Canadian officials must be addressed.”


Source
Halifax environmental group files lawsuit against federal government, Global News
Groups Sue Canadian Government Over GE Salmon, Center for Food Safety

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Canada sued over approval of “toxic” GMO salmon

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Carbon trading is booming in North America, no thanks to U.S. or Canadian governments

by gwm6zjf3 Posted on January 4, 2014

Carbon trading is booming in North America, no thanks to U.S. or Canadian governments

By

NASA

In most of the carbon-trading world, it has been getting cheaper in recent years to buy the rights to pollute the atmosphere with climate-changing carbon dioxide. That’s largely because recession-afflicted Europe is awash with too many carbon allowances for its trading scheme to have any real bite, and because demand for U.N.-issued allowances has crashed along with hopes of a meaningful international climate agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

But in a bleak year for carbon markets, North America was a rising star.

Despite ongoing failure by the U.S. and Canadian governments to impose limits or taxes on greenhouse gas pollution, state and regional initiatives on the east and west coasts of North America moved forward.

California and Quebec are now the most expensive places in the world in which to pump carbon dioxide into the air.

Still, the value of global carbon markets plummeted last year, according to a new analysis published by Thomson Reuters Point Carbon. “The healthy growth in the North American markets was not enough to compensate for a stagnating European market and the collapse of UN-issued credits,” it found.

For the first time since 2010, the global carbon markets receded year-on-year in terms of transacted volumes.  …

The drop in value was more significant: as European carbon prices continued to fall, and the price of international credits collapsed completely, the total value of the transactions was 38.5 billion euros [$52.3 billion], a 38 percent decrease from the 2012 value. …

The year saw a bloom in the North American carbon markets, with strong growth in California and renewed activity in the north-eastern states’ Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) market. We assess overall transactions to have been 390 million metric tonnes with a value of $2.8 billion (€2 billion). This equals a volume growth of 200 percent and a value growth of 262 percent.

In the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) that encompasses California and the Canadian province of Québec, carbon allowance and offset prices are the highest in the world, with the allowance price floor of $10.71/t (approximately €7.8) in 2013 and trades clearing above that.

As the following graph shows, North America still has a long way to go before it could rival the sheer size of the E.U. Emission Trading Scheme (which trades EUAs) or, to a lesser extent, the U.N.-run international market for certified emission reductions (CERs) and emission reduction units (ERUs):

Thomson Reuters Point CarbonClick to embiggen.

Other highlights in 2013 carbon-trading news included the launch of trading programs in China and Mexico. A lowlight was Australia’s election of a new prime minister, Tony Abbott, who pledges to dismantle his country’s trading program.


Source
Carbon Market Monitor: A Review of 2013, Thomson Reuters Point Carbon

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Continued: 

Carbon trading is booming in North America, no thanks to U.S. or Canadian governments

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