After a not great week, I was cooling off in front of the 7:30 local news on the RTBF.
An interesting news-cover discussed the results of the measure of pollution quotas.
Following Kyoto, official instances set-up a measure system in order to determine whether polluting companies where meeting their maximum allowed quantity of for example CO2 emissions.
Apparently, they're all meeting their quotas.
This holds as consequence that the price of the CO2 stock, that can be bought on an official market if your company is exceeding the quotas, remains rather low. The graph shows price drop over the last month.
PointCarbon is the leading provider of independent analysis, forecasting, market intelligence and news for the power, gas and carbon emissions markets. They confirm the findings.
The WWF – World Wildlife Fund – concurs that emission rates are being met and that action should be taken based upon the results of these findings.
It reminds me of the recurrent questions I get regarding conversion rates from my clients…
Facts:
1. Conversion rates are poorly defined today. The Web Analytics Association is doing a great and very tough work, trying to structure a very young business. Within a couple of months I think and hope standards will be more clearly defined, both on a technical and business level. Thus conversion should be very clearly defined through for example the description of the used formula and technical specifications.
2. Each company has its own business model, strategy and evolves within it's own market.
3. The available information is currently rendered by countries which have integrated Internet at a higher level.
Therefore, trying to use benchmarks or loosing time looking for benchmarks is waisted. Your business is your own and your formulas will be today only forged by best practices available, hopefully from your Web Analytics specialist.
The Kyoto agreement was set-up to make our planet a better world. They had to start somewhere so they set quotas that seemed reasonable. This has allowed countries to start to measure the quantity of CO2 polluting our planet. Now it's time to take action because the data is available and value is attributable. In short, I feel that companies are not paying enough for the caused externalities. Something has to be done!
Such a reflection is the basis of Web Analysis.
As long as you don't give value to the measured data, you'll only be engaging into Web Measurement.
The true benefit can only be found when your web analytics data holds a notion of value. That's when goals begin to be set and the fun starts 😉
Think about the consequences if the quotas had been set too high. Wouldn't the Kyoto agreement have suffered more resistance and thus not have survived?
The importance is to start measuring and in the beginning, you're not looking to know whether you're doing well.
You want to know, after having set-up the right base, if you can do better. Hopefully, by the time you get there, more standards will have arisen from the professionalism and the creativity of the WAA. We count on you, Jim!
OX2 Web Analytics Blog 
May 25, 2006 at 1:52 pm
Today I was reading an article about this topic on ‘Trends-Tendances’ a business weekly belgian magazine. The article is titled “The European firms: too ‘clean’ for the CO2 stock market. Here are some complementary numbers:
– In 2005, the 9000 most polluting industrial sites have been responsible for 1.785 Million tons of CO2 (Out of the 1.829 Mt ‘allowed’ for that year!!!)
– The EU has targeted a reduction of CO2 emissions of 8% by 2012 in comparison with 1990 figures.
– In Europe 11.000 industrial sites have received rights to pollute
– The stock price had almost reached 30€ in april 2006 and then suddenly by end april, early may it has known a low of less than 15€. The stock price seems to be growing again and it’s today around 19€ per ton.
By 2008 a new period should start with new emission targets and they will most certainly be more severe, the stock market will then gain more interest from industrial firms (and thus some success).
May 31, 2006 at 5:45 am
This is going to sound totally random but at first I read “Site pollution related benchmarks” – not “Setting pollution related benchmarks”. Therefore the idea: in the reports or a KPI, can you split your traffic in Valuable traffic vs. Junk traffic? Part of the reason why conversion rates are so low even today is because there is a lot of unqualified traffic landing on the site. Maybe there is a way to measure that – and reduce the junk (or pollution) 😉
Anyway – just a (very) random thought.
August 13, 2006 at 10:37 pm
I’ve just noticed that the little graph that Aurélie inserted get’s updated in real time. Hummm, seems that the CO2 is going slightly down these past months 😉
May 22, 2007 at 8:25 pm
Hummm, today the price is 0,30… Not good news…