---------------------- Forwarded by John Arnold/HOU/ECT on 03/23/2001 12:32 
PM ---------------------------


"Zerilli, Frank" <fzerilli@POWERMERCHANTS.COM> on 03/23/2001 08:10:05 AM
To: "'jarnold@enron.com'" <jarnold@enron.com>
cc:  
Subject: Here is the Article---no picture though...


Warming Up To Green

BY ERIC ROSTON

Breathe in. Hold it. Hold it. O.K., now breathe out.

Unless you're outdoors in the midst of a cold snap, chances are you
can't see
your breath. And no one would ever ask you to drop a quarter in a tin
box for the
right to free this invisible spirit from your lungs. Yet last November,
Murphy Oil
Corp., based in El Dorado, Ark., voluntarily shelled out several hundred
thousand dollars for the right to cough out carbon dioxide, the same
stuff you
exhaled three sentences ago.

The reason it did so is closely related to events that occurred that
same autumn
day, half a world away, at the Hague. Thousands of policymakers and
scientists
from all over the world had gathered, hoping to dot the i's, cross the
zeds and
umlaut the o's on the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the U.N. Framework
Convention on
Climate Change. The protocol was devised to curb the industrial emission
of six
gases, CO2 among them, that are slowly--actually quickly in geological
terms--turning the earth into a hothouse. But no final accord was
reached.

In this context, Murphy's purchase of options on 210,000 metric tons of
carbon
(the equivalent of annual exhaust from approximately 27,800 cars) from a
Canadian company that was itself trying to help meet a national target
seems a
bit odd. The market for this kind of trade hasn't been established, and
there isn't
even a global agreement on how carbon dioxide should be valued. Indeed
there
isn't even unanimity on global warming itself.

Yet the transaction is emblematic of industry on the verge of an
environmental
transition. Congress may have snubbed the Kyoto accord, and global
bureaucrats may be stumbling over the details of a carbon-emissions
trading
system. But corporations, against the run of play, are beginning to
confront the
climate conundrum the best way they know how--as a business opportunity.
John Browne, CEO of BP Amoco, and Mark Moody-Stuart, chairman of Royal
Dutch/Shell Group, have both responded to the global-warming threat and
set up
internal systems that exceed goals put forth in Kyoto. Shell and BP have
vowed
to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions 10% each--nearly twice the Kyoto
target--Shell by 2002, BP by 2010. "This isn't an act of altruism," says
Aidan
Murphy of Shell. "It's a fundamental strategic issue for our business."

And not theirs alone. A growing number of corporations, from IBM to your
neighborhood Kinko's, are reducing their greenhouse footprints. DuPont
is
pledging to knock its emissions 65% below 1990 levels by 2010. "There's
been a
shift in the center of gravity in the U.S. corporate community since
Kyoto," says
Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Now the view is that
climate
change is serious and we ought to do something about it."

There are a few ways of doing that: invest in renewable energy sources
and "cap
and trade" emissions. That is, set ceilings for worldwide greenhouse-gas
emission
and let nations either sell emission credits if they emit below their
allowance or
buy credits if they exceed permitted levels. The theory is that the
pursuit of
greenbacks will fuel greener business. "Whenever you turn a pollution
cut into a
financial asset," says Joseph Goffman, an attorney at Environmental
Defense,
"people go out and make lots of pollution cuts."

Even where green fervor is of a paler shade, corporations are viewing
the
potential for global regulation as a business risk they need to
consider. Witness
Claiborne Deming, Murphy's CEO, who doesn't see the science of global
warming
as solid enough yet to cry havoc. But Deming hears shareholders
clamoring and
the bureaucrats buzzing. Someone may ask his company to put more than a
quarter in that box when it wants to exhale more than its allotted
amount of CO2.

Breathe in. Hold it. You know the drill.

How much CO2 did you just exhale? Tricky question. Yet that's analogous
to the
one businesses are struggling with on a massive scale. Until they figure
it out,
companies interested in trading will be on their own to determine 1) how
you
buy the right to emit a gas that has no standard of measurement and 2)
how to do
so when no nation currently assigns a CO2 property right. "It's risky as
hell," says
Deming.

Many groups are working to mitigate that risk. The World Resources
Institute
and others are road-testing a system that would make trading less risky
by
creating universal carbon-accounting practices. And four
companies--Arthur
Andersen, Credit Lyonnais, Natsource and Swiss Re--are developing an
exchange
where companies can trade, even in an embryonic market devoid of
legislative
standards. "They're trying to nail down something that will be useful
under laws
that are not yet defined," says Garth Edward, a broker at Natsource, an
energy-trading firm.

The U.S. struggled to introduce a cap-and-trade system into the Kyoto
Protocol,
and achieved it by agreeing to a tough, many say impossible, target:
bringing
emissions 7% below 1990 levels from 2008 to 2012. The irony of the
current
situation is that the Europeans, reluctant to accept trading at first,
have become
its champion; Britain next month will become the first country to embark
on a
national trading system.

Another practice, still hotly debated, is to assign credits for
sequestering carbon
in growing forests. Trees soak up limited amounts of CO2, release oxygen
into the
air and turn carbon into wood.

The Kyoto mechanisms will evaporate without global ratification, thus
setting up
an early environmental test for President Bush, who campaigned against
the
document. But Secretary of State Colin Powell has already heard
preliminary
briefings on the matter as the U.S. preps for the next round of talks,
to be held in
Bonn in mid-July. Bush the First helped pioneer credit trading in 1990,
when he
signed legislation that capped power plants' sulfur dioxide
emissions--the main
ingredient in acid rain--but allowed the plants to swap credits. And
Houston-based Enron, an energy trader whose chairman, Ken Lay, was a
prominent W. campaign adviser, stands to be a huge player in any such
market.
So if it's good for business, Bush the ex-businessman won't need that
big a push.

With him or without him, the monetization of carbon emissions--green for
greed's sake, if nothing else--is gaining momentum. So breathe easy. For
you, it's
still free. But for many companies, the carbon meter will be running
soon. In the
very near future, pollution is going to be either a cost to them or an
opportunity.