Weekly newsletter - Monday 24th of January 2011

EU emissions trading scheme
The EU emission trading scheme has come under fire this week over its security and a separate communication mistake. The scheme is currently the largest in the world but it is expected that it will soon be overtaken by the Californian cap-and-trade scheme. The European Commission posted on its website on Friday morning that offset credits for some greenhouse gases would be banned from 2013. This posting was taken down after half and hour and a three hours later a similar statement to the first with more clarifications was posted. Some city traders lost significant sums of money when the price of carbon rose sharply after the first announcement and fell again after the clarification was made. The commission issued an apology over the debacle.
The trading system has been the target of a number of cyber attacks since it was first set up and this week it was taken offline after it was discovered that certificates worth £5.9 million had been stolen from an account based in the Czech Republic. It is rumoured that accounts have also been hacked in Austria, Estonia, Greece and Poland. It is expected that the system will be back online in about a week after each member state has agreed an minimum level of security for their own registry.
It is important that these issues are resolved and confidence restored in the system which is important for helping tackle human green house gas emissions.
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The Vicious Arctic Circle
Existing oil fields around the world are failing to satisfy our thirst for oil and increasingly attention is turning to the far north. Melting ice in the Arctic reveals further opportunities for oil exploration but the Deep water Horizon disaster of last summer has increased concern over the environmental impacts of drilling in such a delicate environment. Last weekend BP signed its first deal since last April. It has planned a joint venture with the Russian state owned firm Rosneft to explore for oil in the South Kara Sea, to the north of the Siberian region where BP already operates. There are potentially huge deposits of oil and gas in this region.
Bruce parry, explorer and documentary maker recently visited northern Greenland and describes the Arctic as “the new environmental battleground”. There is growing concern because shifting ice makes exploration and drilling more complicated and if there was a leak the ice would make it very difficult to clean it all up. There is however some local support for oil activities which would bring jobs and considerable economic benefits for the local population.