Carbon Companies Lose Too Much Value
Nicolas Loris /
From the New York Times Green, Inc Blog:
The banking giant HSBC removed two companies involved in carbon trading from its Climate Change Index on Monday because they had lost too much value. Analysts from HSBC said the cause was mainly that governments had failed to come up with a timetable for a global climate deal at the United Nations summit in Copenhagen in December. “Carbon trading was the major loser from Copenhagen,” HSBC analysts said in their March 2010 Quarterly Index Review. ‘Cap and trade needs hard targets and binding rules – and Copenhagen delivered neither,’ HSBC said.”
In 2007 HSBC created a Global Climate Change Benchmark Index and had four climate change indices, two of which include a Climate Change Index and a HSBC Low Carbon Energy Production Index (including: solar, wind, biofuels, geothermal). An HSBC press statement reads: “In creating these indices, HSBC has responded to changing investor sentiment in global equity markets. The HSBC research team has looked at a wide range of stocks and identified approximately 300 companies that are well positioned to benefit from the challenges of climate change.”