*Due to the Easter holidays, the next edition of CP Daily will be published on Tuesday, Apr. 18*
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South Korea, New Zealand open talks on joint carbon markets
South Korea and New Zealand have formed an Environmental Committee to discuss the development of emissions trading markets in the Asia-Pacific region, NZ Climate Change Minister Paula Bennett said Thursday.
Volume drops to 11.25 mt in Australia’s fifth ERF auction
Australia bought 11.25 million tonnes of CO2e reductions in its fifth Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) auction, the Clean Energy Regulator said Thursday, less than a third of the offsets contracted in the previous round.
UN mulls CDM-like mechanism for climate adaptation
Countries are to hold talks on whether to create a new mechanism similar to the CDM in an effort to attract hundreds of millions of dollars in private sector investment for climate adaptation.
EU Market: EUAs little changed to end abridged week 1.2% higher
European carbon ended virtually flat on Friday in rangebound trade and on light volume to post a 1.2% gain across a curtailed trading week.
Voluntary carbon market data from CTX for Apr. 13, 2017
A table of Verified Emission Reduction (VER) prices and offered volumes, based on voluntary market data provided by Carbon Trade Exchange (CTX).
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BITE-SIZED UPDATES FROM AROUND THE WORLD
A battle not worth fighting – Despite the Trump Administration’s concerted effort to roll back climate policies, climate deniers are growing increasingly vocal with their demands for extreme action from Washington. As the New York Times reports, EPA chief Scott Pruitt faces ire from the far right over his refusal to challenge the agency’s 2009 endangerment finding, which found that carbon emissions were harmful to human health and underpins most climate change rules. And Pruitt may also be feeling more uneasy about his role: leaked EPA budget documents show a 24/7 security detail request for the EPA boss, an increase in the level of security from what was provided to his predecessor Gina McCarthy. (Climate Nexus)
But in an attempt to regain his anti-climate street cred, Pruitt on Thursday said the US should withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Speaking to Fox and Friends this morning, he said the Paris deal was “something we need to exit, in my opinion. It’s a bad deal for America,” while arguing that staying in the deal opened the US up to outside pressure. “The people who say that it’s not enforceable, every meeting I’ve had with my counterparts from Germany, Canada and others, the first question they ask me with is: ‘what are you going to do to comply with Paris?’ And so what that means is contracting our economy to serve and really satisfy Europe and China and India. They are polluting far more than we are. We are at pre-1994 levels, with respect to our CO2 emissions.” Read more from Climate Home.
Room for one more – Donald Trump has been stacking his administration with officials wishing to undo Barack Obama’s climate policies or denying climate change science altogether, but is about to find one room for one more, according to a report by Politico. Kathleen Hartnett White is a top contender for the post as head of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, where she would be expected to launch an attack against the 2009 EPA “endangerment” finding that obligates the agency to regulate greenhouse gases. White, who has held similar positions in Texas as well as working for various right-wing think-tanks, has rubbished claims that CO2 drives climate change, calling it the “gas of life”.
Next stop on the Oregon trail – An Oregon cap & trade bill – SB557 – has been approved by the state senate’s Committee On Environment and Natural Resources, ICIS reports, though doubts remain about whether the bill will find broader support in the full legislature.
33 years early – US-based CRM software company Salesforce in 2015 set itself a climate change goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, and today the company announced that it has met that mark in 2017. Check out CleanTechnica to learn how they did it.
And finally… Earth Day awesomeness – Earth Day may not seem an obvious time to celebrate fossil fuels. The Independence Institute, a Denver-based free-market think tank that has ties to the oil and coal industries, wants to change that. It is having an “Earth Day Fossil Fuels Art Contest” meant to showcase “the awesomeness of fossil fuels,” Bloomberg reports. “Enviros celebrate by planting trees but they never celebrate the trucks that deliver the trees, or the gas that powers that truck, or the plastic handles of the shovels they use,” the group said in an announcement of the contest. “Shouldn’t Mother Earth be thanked for making Earth Day events possible?” Semi-finalists will be announced on Earth Day, April 22. The winner gets a $100 gasoline gift card.
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