Zuwy's Pandora

The price of carbon hit a record low in Europe on Monday as the over-supply of emissions permits during the global economic downturn continued to undermine the carbon market. The price fell below 4.8 euros in early trading, before recovering to above 5 euros by late afternoon. Carbon permits are a mechanism designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, as companies have to pay to emit C02. A sharp drop in demand for energy has led to a massive oversupply of permits. Critics of the EU's Emissions Trading System also argue that the European Union issued too many permits in the first place. The EU has proposed freezing up to 900 million permits to tackle this oversupply. "There are too many permits because of the recession," said Isaac Valero, spokesman for EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard. The price of carbon recovered slightly on Monday after demand for an auction of 3.5 million permits was stronger than ...

By Emily Haves, Ashden Research Programme Coordinator Energy access is an increasingly hot topic in development circles, but what does it actually mean? We talk about it as if it’s a binary state – either you have it, or you don’t – but is this helpful? And how much is enough? Is hauling a car battery across town to charge it up so you can power a few lights for a few hours considered ‘access’?  Most people would say that being connected to the national grid means you have energy access. But what if this regularly cuts out without notice, as we saw dramatically in India last summer ? From my internet trawl, everyone writing about and working in this field is generally clear that ‘energy’ means electricity and clean cooking. Yet startlingly, few actually define ‘access’. The three attempts at definition I found came from the International Energy Agency  (IEA), a paper by UNIDO/The Earth Institute , and UNDP .  The first thing I noticed is that they ar...