BRUSSELS — Carbon markets have had a rocky ride since trading began five years ago in the European Union.
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The latest bump came last month, when swindlers used faked e-mail messages to obtain access codes for individual accounts on national registries that make up the bloc’s Emission Trading System.
Traders and companies who fell for the ploy on Jan. 28 were directed to a rogue Web site and invited to enter their security codes — a practice known as “phishing” in the jargon of the Internet.
The swindlers used the stolen codes to gain access to electronic certificates that represent quantities of greenhouse gases. They then sold the certificates through trading accounts registered in Denmark and Britain.
The attack on the German national registry, which appears to have been among the hardest hit, could have netted the swindlers as much as $4 million.
The European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch that oversees the system, said last week that it had started an investigation into the fake Web site and was “working on closing it definitively.”
In Britain, the Serious Organized Crime Agency and the Financial Services Authority were investigating the case, according to the British authorities.
Carbon trading is a system that caps the amount of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, that companies may emit each year. Companies exceeding their quota can buy extra certificates from those companies that succeeded in shrinking their carbon footprint by adopting environmentally friendly technology or modifying production in other ways.
The system is the main tool used by the European Union to meet its ambitious pollution-reduction goals.
Many economists say trading provides the most economically efficient way to reduce pollution. They point out that environmental markets elsewhere in the world, including in the United States, have succeeded in bringing down levels of sulfur dioxide emissions, which cause acid rain.
But since the start of the system in Europe, coal-burning utilities have earned windfall profits, while the prices of credits have never been high enough for long enough to force utilities and businesses to replace conventional power with significant amounts of renewable energy or other clean sources.
Other forms of shady trades have beset the carbon markets in Europe.
Last summer, the police confirmed that swindlers had been adding value-added tax to the price of carbon permits sold to businesses — and then disappearing before turning the tax over to governments.
Frenetic trading linked to the popularity of the tax scam was responsible for huge spikes in volume on some European exchanges last year. In December, Europol estimated that E.U. governments had lost about $7.4 billion in tax revenues. Governments now say they have mostly plugged the loophole.
Proponents of carbon trading are quick to point out that cyberattacks and tax fraud are far from unique to the carbon markets, and that any new venture is bound to have teething troubles.
Last week, the European Commission emphasized that the attack would not set back its plans to include international airlines in the system beginning in 2012, and it vowed to impose “high-security standards in its legislation to prepare for the inclusion of the aviation sector” in the system.
The trading system, in operation since 2005, already includes sectors like power generation, chemicals and steel making.
Under the soon-to-be expanded system, all airlines landing in or taking off from the European Union— including American and Asian carriers — will need to hold a certain quantity of credits.
“No die-hard anti-carbon trading company in Europe is under any illusions any more that this will go away,” said Mark C. Lewis, who analyzes carbon markets at Deutsche Bank.
Matthew Cowie, a carbon markets expert at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research company, said the attack highlighted how “people are recognizing that there are increasingly large amounts of money in this market and that these certificates represent real assets.”
Other analysts said the attack had little to do with the underlying factors that will determine the future of carbon trading.
According to Abyd Karmali, the global head of carbon markets for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, the biggest obstacle to the expansion of trading systems globally is the willingness of politicians to take the time to explain to voters that it will cost far less to curb climate change now than to deal with the problem later.
Mr. Karmali acknowledged there was growing skepticism in the United States about carbon trading. But he said chances were still good that the United States would adopt such a system in the coming years.
The participation of the United States and other major economies like Japan would create a global market that could be worth up to $3 trillion annually by 2020, compared with its current annual value of $130 billion, he said.
Even the toughest critics of emissions markets agreed that the cyberattack was the least of their worries.
“Yes, the hack was part of a steady rain of scandals,” said Larry Lohmann of Corner House, an advocacy group for environmental and social justice based in Britain.
“But a deeper problem is measuring whether the so-called reductions in emissions that are claimed by participants in these markets actually happen at all,” said Mr. Lohmann. That, he contended, would “turn out to be the far bigger fraud.”
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