Amidst the talk about the benefits that Kyoto Protocol is supposed to promote, it is perhaps forgotten, especially amongst the greenies, how the treaty that is supposed to save the world from the evil extravagances of itself was born in the corridors of very big business. The name Enron has all but faded from our news pages since the company went down in flames in 2001 amidst charges of fraud, bribery, price fixing and graft. But
without Enron there would have been no Kyoto Protocol.
About 20 years ago Enron was owner and operator of an interstate network of natural gas pipelines, and had transformed itself into a billion-dollar-a-day commodity trader, buying and selling contracts and their derivatives to deliver natural gas, electricity, internet bandwidth, whatever. The 1990 Clean Air Act amendments authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to put a cap on how much pollutant the operator of a fossil-fueled plant was allowed to emit. In the early 1990s Enron had helped establish the market for, and became the major trader in, EPA’s $20 billion-per-year
sulphur dioxide cap and trade program, the forerunner of today's proposed carbon credit trade. This commodity exchange of emission allowances caused Enron’s stock to rapidly rise.
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