Hazel Henderson

Understanding Cap and Trade: Why It Has Been the Option of Choice

Let's keep the cap and ditch the "trade", which is an open invitation to Wall Street to game the system. Banks are now savoring the some $2 trillion of carbon derivatives as a new profit center from this new "asset class". So far , where cap and trading of carbon is in effect in Europe , lobbyists for the electric utilities got so many free " allowances" that they crashed the carbon market. They made windfall profits by adding to consumers bills. Bottom line : no reduction of carbon emissions !
Better to go with GREEN TAX SHIFTING, where income and payroll taxes are reduced and shifted in a revenue neutral way to waste,and all forms of pollition, not just carbon. Meanwhile, the Climate Prosperity Alliance offers the best path to a low-carbon world economy ( see EthicalMarkets.com click on Climate Prosperity Funds and globalurban.org click on Climate Prosperity.)Let's change the debate from costs to incumbent fossil fuel sectors to the benefits, savings and revenues from investing over the next 10 years to ramp up energy efficiency and the renewable sectors of the emerging Solar Age.

JP Morgan: High Frequency Trading a Form of Parasitic Market Making

Thanks for this article, helping explain another bunch of reasons not to trust Wall St.

Renewable Energy Finance Forum: Looking to Washington for Guidance on New Financing

Watch for the release of the report soon in Beijing on Climate Solutions : Low Carbon Re-Industrialization on Climate Prosperity Bonds ( see EthicalMarkets.com click on Climate Prosperity Funds.)

Cap-and-Trade and the Cheap Energy Illusion

Thank you,Jeff Siegel ! I take your Newsletter and I personally invested in many of your stock picks, including Nevada Geothermal, Western Wind, World Water and Solar ,Comverge ,Itron, Eneroc and others. I have written about Green Tax shifting for decades : reduce taxes on incomes and payrolls and shift them to virgin resource exploitation m energy waste and all forms of pollution, not just carbon. Then get the world's pension funds ( $120 trillion in assets) to invest in Climate Prosperity Bonds ( see EthicalMarkets.com)

The Bubble Blowers: Goldman Sachs and Cap and Trade

Thanks for the truth telling , on cap and trade ( forced into the climate debate by US market fundamentalists) , as well as on Goldman !
I have advocated the " green tax shift " used in Europe : reduce taxes on incomes and payrolls and raise the same amount on all forms of pollution ( not just carbon), and on energy waste and unneccesary exreaction of virgin resources when recycled materials are available. this would be revenue neutral and get the price signals going right.( more at EthicalMarkets.com )

Why Solar ETFs Are Moving Higher

Agreed ! An even more potentially bullish development is the new global effort to fund Climate Prosperity , with a viable plan to invest $10 trillion over the next ten years to double installed renewable energy and efficiecy savings each year . This $10 trillion is less that the $14 trillion spent in the US Wall Street and other bailouts so far and is less than 10% of the $120 trillion of assets in pension funds .Climate Prosperity bonds , with laddered maturities related to the payouts from energy efficiency ( the quickest payback) to the efficiencies of scale in wind , geothermal and solar , as they are expanded , will be attractive to pension fund asset managers. During this ten-year rollout of the new low-carbon economy globally, fossil fuels will become less and less competitive ( even without accounting for their external costs and the price of carbon).
More on all this at EthicalMarkets.com click on Climate Prosperity Funds on the left of our home page.

Bookstaber: 'Derivatives Are the Weapon of Choice'

Thanks ,Bookstaber ! I've given out gift copies of your A Demon of Our Own Design and reviewed it at Calvert-Henderson.com and EthicalMarkets.com
How about re-classifyings CDSs as bets ( not insurance or finanical "products" ) and have them brough under the jurisdiction of Gaming Commissions , just like racetrack gambling and betting parlors. ?

Carbon Cap and Trade's Possible Winners

Sorry, Tad Gage's Wall Street-centric worldview misses the real , low-hanging fruit : improving our ability to manage soils and restore fertility , which will allow our croplands and rangelands to do our carbon capture for us , at vastly lower costs . Read Allan Savory's 1980 blockbuster, Holistic Resource Management ( Island Press) to get the idea. Cap and trade was always a hoax and a regulation-driven buraucratic nightmare , as the Eurpoeans discovered. The sooner we put a tax on carbon and all pollutants and waste , and close down carbon trading the better.. We need holistic Green Tax Shifting ( revenue-neutral and rebated to reduce income taxes and payroll taxes ) I wrote about this in " Green Taxes" in the Christian Science Monitor in 1990 !

Will Larry Summers Be the Next Gordon Brown?

In most cases I agree with Simon Johnson, and I certainly agree that Larry Summers should re-join the hedge fund industry and leave the Obama team alone. He still has not apologized for his role in the credit default swap mess and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. But in this case , I disagree with Simon and Oliver Blanchard . We do not need to re-inflate the dysfunctional, bloated banking system. We do need fiscal stimulus to build the infrastructure for the new Green Economy as rapidly as possible
( see EthicalMarkets.com and our TV series on Growing the Green Economy( seen on PBS stations and at EthicalMarkets.tv ). The New Financiers are already bypassing Wall Street and know that money is not the only form of wealth . Their new information and trading networks are already dis-intermediating the too big to fail old banks. These parasitic old banks can be downsized and re-emerge after their bonds have been converted to common stock, as necessary. Here I agree with Ackerman of Pershing Square .

Google: Carbon Credit Shopping Ain’t Easy

Yes, carbon trading is already in the " sub-prime" category : few standards and lots of traders and trading , but not much carbon being removed from our atmosphere .
Better to go with revenue-neutral " green " tax shifting, where taxes on incomes and payrolls ( which we want more of) are reduced and shifted to all forms of pollution ( not just carbon) , as well as waste, planned obsolescence and resuroce extraction ( which we want less of) . This would hasten the shift to a cleaner, greener , energy-efficient economy without creating the next Wall Street financial bubble.

A Central Banker 2.0 Proposal: The Berkshire Bill

There already is a local currency in Great Barrington Massachusetts in the Berkshires called : Berkshares: issued by the E.F.Schumacher Society, and accepted by six local banks and most of the town's merchants , with about $2 million equivalent already in circulation. Check this out at smallisbeautiful.org as well as in TIME, and on many TV news shows

Disclosure : I am a member of the Advisory Board of the E.F. Schumacher Society and also write about local currencies at EthicalMarkets.com and my recent article " Democratizing Finance " is also on Seeking Alpha

The Obama Effect: Is Clean Energy Outperforming the Market?

Perhaps Wall Street is finally catching on to the need to update their " fossilized " asset allocation and sector models , and break out the new Sustainability Sector as I have been uging at Seeking Alpha and EthicalMarkets.com

Green Stimulus by Nation

Thanks for this useful chart, Markham ! May we post it at EthicalMarkets.com on our GreenTech page ?

Two Economies, And One Must Die

Agreed! I have been writing about the problems with the Global Casino since my Building A Win Win World ( 1996) In the USA the Obama team must rid itself of all the Casino insiders ; Summers, Geithner,Volcker as well as all the Robert Rubin clones. They cannot believe that we can now bypass Wall Street and the "too big to bail: banks . Yet millions of local leaders are rebuilding homegrown econonmies with local actions : credit unions, local currencies, electronic barter systems, farmers' markets , private venture capital networks , see my The New Financiars at Seeking Alpha and at EthicalMarkets.com

Cleantech, Optimism Squared and the Battery Industry

Good stuff, John! My The Politics of the Solar Age tracks these same evolutions of industrialism , but cam out in 1981....20 years too soon! We are now seeing this politics of transitionto the Solar Age. Disclosure : long ZBB