Carbon Trading bukannya lagi seru Pak? Jadi penurunan emisi CO2 dilakukan di
negara berkembang karena harganya lebih murah dibandingkan jika harus dilakukan
di negara maju. Kalau ga salah kira2 biayanya bisa sampai 1/4nya gituhh.
Menurut Kyoto protokol, pengurangan emisi CO2 bisa lewat Joint Implementation
(JI) Carbon Trading (CT), dan Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Hanya CDM yg
memungkinkan kerjasama antara negara maju dan berkembang.
Dean Earwicker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: kira-kira
ML mo ngapain nih..
Regards,
DE
Last Updated: April 18, 2008: 10:40 AM EDT
Merrill Lynch's carbon bet
Why a Wall Street firm wants to save a forest in Sumatra.
By Marc Gunther, senior writer
(Fortune) -- The business of "carbon farming" is growing fast -- and Merrill
Lynch is the latest big company to bet that it will become profitable.
What's carbon farming, you ask? It's a business designed to recognize the value
created when trees store carbon dioxide and prevent global warming. So people
who plant new trees or prevent existing trees from destruction can get paid for
doing so.
That doesn't mean that the tree in your backyard or mine will help pay college
tuition or fund a 401(k). For now, the payments are going to villagers in the
developing world who agree to protect endangered forests. Starbucks (SBUX,
Fortune 500), Marriott (MAR, Fortune 500) and Rio Tinto (RTP), among others,
have all agreed to finance projects designed to deter deforestation.
This week, Merrill Lynch (MER, Fortune 500) announced that it will invest $9
million to help save a tropical forest in Aceh, Indonesia. It's the first time
a Wall Street firm has invested in carbon farming, and let's be clear: this
isn't philanthropy of public relations; it's strictly business.
In fact, the man who put the deal together to save the 1.9-million acre forest,
called Ulu Masen, believes it could be a very big business. "It will be the
biggest carbon project in the history of the world if we can pull it off," says
Dorjee Sun, the 31-year-old founder of an Australian startup company called
Carbon Conservation.
Here's how the deal will work: Merrill will pay villagers in Aceh, a province
on the island of Sumatra, to stop logging their forests. Aceh, of course, is
the place that was devastated by a tsunami in 2004 and, before that, wracked by
civil unrest. It's also home to Sumatran tigers, clouded leopards and
orangutans, and therefore of special interest to environmentalists. The money
will be used to train the villagers in alternative livelihoods, like growing
coffee, cocoa or palm trees for oil.
In exchange, Merrill will get carbon credits, which are also known as carbon
offsets -- that's the "crop" in carbon farming. The credits will meet quality
standards set a group called the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance
(CCBA), whose members include environmental groups Conservation International,
The Nature Conservancy and the Rainforest Alliance, and companies as BP, Intel
and SC Johnson. The alliance functions as a regulator, albeit without legal
clout.
Merrill will pay about $4 per credit for 500,000 credits per year over the next
four years --$8 million in all. (The other $1 million buys an option to acquire
more credits.) Merrill then hopes to sell them for a profit to companies that
want to voluntarily offset their carbon emissions. Currently, these voluntary
credits --each one represents a ton of CO2 that is prevented from entering the
atmosphere -- sell from between $2 and $20 each, according to Andrew Ertel, the
president and CEO of Evolution Markets, a leading broker of emissions credits.
The credits will be worth a lot more if they can be sold into regulated
markets. Greenhouse gases are regulated in Europe and Japan, and laws to
control them are being considered in the U.S. and Australia. So far, though,
projects like this one -- called "avoided deforestation" or REDD projects, for
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation -- have not been approved
for regulated markets. Deforestation is said to account for about 20% of all
global greenhouse gas emissions.
"This is uncharted territory," says Abyd Karmali, global head of carbon
emissions at Merrill Lynch. "That's part of the risk that Merrill is taking.
How much appetite will there be for credits from projects of this type?"
Speaking by phone from Jakarta, Dorjee Sun says he has pitched large-scale
avoided deforestation projects to more than 200 banks, hedge funds, pension
funds and conservation groups. He's working with governors in Indonesia and
Brazil, and came to the U.S. last fall where he pitch deforestation projects to
Howard Schultz of Starbucks and investor George Soros.
Sun, a former Internet entrepreneur, is frank about his motives. "The more
hectares we manage, the more land we 'farm' carbon on, the more money we make,"
he says. "Our goal is to be the amazon.com of the Amazon."
First Published: April 18, 2008: 8:14 AM EDT
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