A Response to Climate Change

An EU Infrastructure to Store Carbon Dioxide

Initiatives to develop the technology of carbon capture will necessitate the deployment of an infrastructure to transport and store the recovered carbon dioxide. Early concepts of how this might be implemented in Europe are outlined in a proposal for a EU demonstration programme by the Zero Emissions from Fossil Fuel Power Plants (ZEP) team and in an economic assessment of carbon capture and storage options prepared by McKinsey & Co.

UK Roadmap to a Lower Carbon Economy

The UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has recently published a plan of how it sees the country transitioning to a low carbon economy. Five main sectors are covered:

Fraudulent Trading of CO2 Emissions

One of the problems with the trading of carbon dioxide emissions is that this is a commodity that cannot be seen or for that matter, easily stored as a physical product! This has already created opportunities for irregular accounting and reporting - see for example an earlier Financial Times (FT) article on the dubious nature of carbon offsets traded via the voluntary market - and a concern noted in a previous blog that there is still little or no requirement for fiscal metering of emissions within the EU's trading system. Now, a case involving value added tax (VAT) fraud between companies registered in different parts of Europe has come to light.