News & Blog
PAL announces that our Director of Research Richard H. Clarke, in conjunction with Dr Anthony J. Webster (University of Oxford) have their article Insurance companies should collect a carbon levy published in Nature News & Comment today.
Taxing all energy – not just fossil fuels – will smooth decarbonisation and future-proof paying the cost of the loss and damage attributable to manmade climate change that will prevail for centuries – long after carbon emissions cease altogether. To incentivise the transition from ‘dirty’ high-carbon fuels to ‘clean’ low-carbon fuels or energy, requires a strong carbon tax signal that relates directly to carbon emissions. That may be stating the obvious. What is less obvious, however, is that carbon taxes must be applied to all energy types and not just fossil fuels.
Just because, today, a carbon tax is either non-existent, toothless or unenforcible, don’t imagine that one will never be created, given teeth and enforced. The climate change storm is already rumbling and its pressure building steadily towards this inevitability – it may be next year, the year after, or the year after that. But prudent asset managers should be wary of its potentially ruinous impact.
This new report published by Predict Ability Ltd (PAL) provides a lens through which the long-term financial impacts of climate change for a portfolio of companies may be measured. Whilst significant change is underway as sectors prepare to transition to a lower-carbon economy, a long-term quantitative risk approach is required to effectively measure the preparedness of individual companies and the rate-of-transition of sectors as a whole. Read the executive summary …
The one and only London Wind Array supplies renewable electricity, partly meeting the needs of London. The 2nd phase of the project has been abandoned however, because endangered Red Throated Divers might be threatened by wind turbines. Meanwhile, Londoners continue to die from diseases caused by polluted air.
Lowering emissions in London by switching to electric vehicles can mean raising CO2 emissions elsewhere. London has a serious problem with air quality. There are public health concerns with Particulate Matter (principally PM 2.5 micro-metre size and PM 10 micro-metre size particles). ‘PMs’ are the respiratory (asthma-inducing) and cancerous particulates emitted by diesel engines. There are also NOx and SOx (nitrogen and sulphur oxides). Ex-UK Chief Scientist Sir David King’s advice that diesel vehicles emitted less CO2 than petrol vehicles led to the upsurge of PM2.5s and PM10s. To be fair to him, he was misled by VW et al,…
On the day (June 1st 2017) that the US announced it is pulling out of the Paris COP21 Agreement, we look at the patchwork of carbon pricing projections in the public domain that are doomed. The EU ETS is not fit for purpose. The UK’s ‘official’ (BEIS) ‘curves’ are not only straight lines, counter-intuitively, they are also dependent on the demonstrably unfit EU ETS. The UK Carbon Price Floor is not expected to survive the UK General Election on June 8th. The US SCC is as of today holed below the waterline. Soon PAL’s carbon pricing curve will be the…
Converting liabilities into assets via Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) can enable oil companies not only to mitigate manmade climate change, but also to turn a tidy profit in the process.
The forthcoming InsiderScope panel discussion ‘Reinsurance: survival tactics in a brutal market’ on 9 May 2017 is timely. The Insurance Industry is being hammered relentlessly by the devastating effects of manmade climate change and the resulting claims payouts. At PAL, we estimate that the percentage increase in insured loss and damage attributable to global warming is about 20%. This is increasing at about half a percent per year. By 2025 it will be an eye-watering 25%. And yet Government reacts by levying evermore punitive taxes on the very enterprise that can save it money.
In my previous posting I promised Joe Bloggs, the proverbial man-in-the-street, more details on how PAL’s universal carbon price is fair, acceptable and affordable – for mankind worldwide. Here we go.