No pun intended but for the world’s carbon community, times are looking a little black.

The global financial crisis, or GFC as it is being called this week during Australia’s largest ever carbon market gathering, is deeply troubling many participants. But a larger, more worrying issue remains “post 2012″.

This is when the Clean Development Mechanism under the current phase of the U.N. Kyoto Protocol runs out, along with the hundreds of CDM projects already approved and the 3,000 still awaiting approval by a U.N. board.

U.N. talks at the end of next year aim to agree on a broader replacement for Kyoto from 2013 and market players are hoping those talks don’t fail. Already there are fears that some rich nations will use the financial crisis as an excuse to say now is not the time to be negotiating tougher emissions curbs that might hurt industry and cost jobs.

“The volume of primary CDM activity is declining. Every month virtually this year, the number of new CDM transactions has been in decline. And that’s because the 2012 deadline is approaching and we’re running out of runway,” said Paul Bodnar, Manager of  Carbon Markets at London-based Climate Change Capital.

In China, the largest source of Kyoto offsets called CERs, the number of projects there are in decline, just as they are elsewhere, said Alex Wyatt, director of Emissions Zero, which helps Chinese entities to become carbon neutral.

“If you wanted to put it on a scale, the financial crisis and the post-2012 uncertainty, many times more significant is the post-2012 uncertainty. If you know what’s going on past 2012 you can invest with a much longer-term horizon,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference on the Gold Coast in Queensland state.

A lot of people are still taking the risk to invest in CDM projects, said Wyatt, whose company has about 130 projects in China, many of them focused on renewable energy.

“But the willingness to do so is decreased. You see it now.  People are investing a lot more in short-term projects that will only take a year or so to build.”

He said the financial market had yet to affect CDM project development in China.

“It’s too early to see any real effects. Projects take a long time. But if there are any effects, they will be seen in a few months.”

“The impact on the VER market is a lot more direct in the sense that a VER is like any retail good. It’s discretionary spending,” he said, referring to verified emission reductions, which must meet firm standards but are outside the Kyoto Protocol.

Renewable power sources like wind and solar are some of the fastest growing sectors in the energy business.

But this graph forecasts that coal, the dirtiest power source in terms of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, will still dominate global power generation growth for decades into the future.

The forecast, released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the statistics branch of the Department of Energy, shows that global power generated from coal will grow 115 percent to 15.36 trillion kilowatt hours from 2005 to 2030.  It assumes no changes in emissions laws or policy.

Global power generation from renewables including hydropower, meanwhile, will grow 58 percent to 5 trillion kilowatt hours over the same time period.

The world is trying to come to an agreement on a new greenhouse gas regulation pact at a U.N. meeting in Copenhagen late next year. Would a new pact eventually make this coal forecast overcooked?

The fate of a Chinese species may rest on whether the turtles in this photo mate.   

Biologists believe only four Yangtze giant softshell turtles are left on the planet.  So this month they shipped a more than 80-year-old female that had been living in China’s Changsha Zoo more than 600 miles to the only known male in China, who is more than 100 years old and lives at the Suzhou Zoo.

“I hate to call this a desperation move, but it really was,” said Rick Hudson, a conservation biologist at the Fort Worth, Texas Zoo who helped coordinate the move. “With only one female known worldwide, and given that we have lost three captive specimens over the past two years, what choice did we have?”

Biologists blame hunting, pollution and rampant development for leading to the dire situation.

The good news is the female still lays eggs, but not as many as the up to 100 that younger ones do.  And although in this picture she may appear to be ignoring the male, whose head can be seen emerging from the water in the bottom right, biologists say her journey went well and that the two are getting used to each other nicely. 

Photo by Gerald Kuchling/TSA