Climate Technology

A chat with Philip V. Adams of the World Green Exchange auction system

Last week, World Energy Exchange, an online energy trading platform, officially launched a new marketplace for renewable-energy certificates and greenhouse-gas permits. The World Green Exchange employs an auction system -- think eBay -- to bring buyers and sellers together. In theory, auctions create a more transparent marketplace and drive out cost inefficiencies by directly connecting the buyer and seller and removing the middleman.

We caught up with World Energy President and COO Philip V. Adams last week to find out how the launch went and why he thinks WGE will stand out in an increasingly crowded field dominated by the Chicago Climate Exchange in the U.S. and European Climate Exchange and European Energy Exchange overseas.

Grist: Congratulations on launching the World Green Exchange. I know it's only been up and running for a couple of days, but is it attracting users and working as you had hoped so far? How will you measure success longer term?

Adams: Thank you. The World Green Exchange was formally launched last week, but in fact we have been conducting transactions on the platform for the past several months. We're a bit of a conservative firm, and took the view that we would have real client success in the marketplace before making an announcement of our capabilities. As we suspected, the auction approach is performing very well. In several transactions conducted to date, we have significantly bettered benchmark prices that were derived to our clients who were using brokers or bid-ask exchanges.

Massey incest redux

So, remember how two justices on the W. Va. Supreme Court have recused themselves from the Massey case? One was photographed frolicking on vacation with Massey CEO Don Blankenship on the French Riviera. The other has publicly criticized Blankenship. The latter fellow said that a third judge — Justice Brent Benjamin, who received $3.5 million […]

GM exec defends calling climate change a ‘crock of shit’

A couple weeks back, GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, at a roundtable with reporters, casually mentioned that he thinks global warming is a "crock of shit." (His point was that it makes sense to develop an all-electric vehicle either way.) Lots and lots of people, mainly bloggers, got in a huge uproar about it. Yesterday, […]

Companies not following through on pledge to lobby for carbon reduction

Companies participating in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership have pledged to lobby for a mandatory cap on U.S. carbon emissions, but — and there’s always a but — many of those same corporations are working behind the scenes to undermine greenhouse-gas regulation. Just a few examples: USCAP members General Electric and Caterpillar sit on the […]

French automaker and waste-management biz team up to recycle cars

French automaker Renault has announced that it will team up with waste-management company Sita to develop end-of-life recycling for automobiles. A European Union directive requires new vehicles to be 95 percent recyclable by 2015, as compared to 85 percent now.

USCRAP

The media was all abuzz when a bunch of big corporations got together to form USCAP, a coalition supporting the implementation of a mandatory cap on carbon emissions in the U.S. Why, big business has gone green! So the headlines said. However, as a great BusinessWeek story today explains, many of those same companies are […]

Did we say ‘beyond petroleum’?

Never mind.

Fidel Castro’s resignation may boost biofuels in Cuba

Fidel Castro’s step down after 49 years as Cuba’s leader may have implications for biofuels in the country. Castro was outspokenly critical of U.S. biofuel policy, and blocked a proposed expansion by ag giant Archer Daniels Midland into Cuba in the 1990s. But Fidel’s brother Raul, who will assume leadership of Cuba, is a biofuels […]

Mining CEO so insinuated in W. Va. politics that they can’t find judges to hear his case

So, you may recall that loathsome mountaintop-removal mining outfit Massey was hit with a $50 million judgment a while back. They appealed it up to the W. Va. Supreme Court, which overturned it. Later, it turned out that Massey CEO Don Blankenship (an evil bastard) had been photographed frolicking with one of the judges in […]

CBS to pay $31 million to clean up Indiana Superfund sites

The media giant CBS has agreed to pay $31 million to clean up six ultra-polluted Superfund sites around Bloomington, Ind. CBS is the corporate successor of Westinghouse, which ran industrial operations in the area that polluted streams and groundwater with high concentrations of PCBs. An agreement to clean up the contamination in the 1990s was […]