You don’t have to give credit where credit isn’t due.

Countries at the United Nations COP29 climate summit struck a deal Saturday on the basic rules to launch a UN-backed international carbon trading market. But the agreement came nearly 10 years after the market was first proposed and, in little more than a year, the world’s second-largest emitter, the United States, could bail.

Hot Investment or Hot Air?

The centralized trading system will let countries and companies create, register and trade credits representing one ton of carbon dioxide saved or removed from earth’s atmosphere to offset their carbon footprints. It could launch as soon as next year.

In anticipation of the rollout, public- and private-sector stakeholders have already negotiated deals. Among them, Norway reserved up to $740 million for purchases, inking agreements with Benin, Jordan, Senegal, and Zambia. Commodity trader Trafigura inked a pilot carbon project deal with Mozambique to develop large-scale forest restoration projects.

However, the technical details aren’t fully ironed out and the UN’s carbon market experts are still in talks with countries about what kinds of credits they can buy and sell. For example, credits tied to hypothetical emissions like forest preservation or mine closures — as opposed to environmental restoration — have proven controversial:

• Business group IETA and University of Maryland researchers estimate the UN-backed carbon market could be worth $250 billion per year and offset an extra five billion metric tons of carbon emissions per year by 2030.
• But carbon markets have been dogged by a series of scandals, including high profile fraud charges and allegations of scams — a recent Nature Communications study found only 16% of carbon credits issued represented real emissions reductions. Investors have pulled out of voluntary credit markets as a result: they shrunk to $723 million last year from $1.9 billion in 2022, according to Ecosystem Marketplace research.

The Elephant Leaving the Room: President-elect Donald Trump pledged to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement which, under its Article 6, outlines the mechanism for global carbon trading. Anna Karakitsos, an adviser at energy law firm Bracewell LLP, told Asia Financial that Trump likely has “an executive order already drafted.” That would leave US carbon project developers unable to participate in the UN-backed carbon market for any US-based projects.

You can almost hear Dwayne Johnson telling Hollywood: “You’re welcome.”

With three major event films — Universal’s Wicked, Paramount’s Gladiator II, and Disney’s Moana 2 — set to dominate multiplex screens this Thanksgiving week, Tinseltown is licking its chops over hopes for the best box office haul during the holiday in years. Are you not entertained?

Defying Gravity

Last year’s historic dual Hollywood talent strikes ate into this year’s theatrical release schedule, especially through the first half of the year. And audiences noticed: Through November, the total domestic box office haul was down 11% compared with 2023. But this holiday season might make things right.

Wicked, the theatrical adaptation of the first half of the major broadway musical (Part II is due next year), and Gladiator II debuted this past weekend to strong results. The former is expected to pull $114 million domestically, according to Sunday estimates, and roughly $50 million outside the US. Gladiator II, meanwhile, is expected to have done around $221 million in business globally by the end of the weekend.

On Wednesday, Disney will add Moana 2 to the mix, setting the stage for a triple-feature blockbuster holiday weekend:

• Moana 2 is tracking to open to a gigantic $125 million to $150 million domestic box office haul over the five-day weekend. The first Moana did around $643 million at the global box office in 2016, and has since, according to Disney, become the most-streamed movie on any streaming platform in the US, with over 1 billion hours worth of watches.
• Analysts are expecting the trio to power the domestic box office to a record high for the holiday weekend — a big win for the industry. That means beating the $316 million record set in 2018, according to Comscore.

Double Dose: Unsurprisingly, the hits Hollywood has been able to score this year are familiar favorites. In fact, Total Film pointed out this weekend, for the first time in history this late in the calendar year, the top 10 performers at the domestic box office are all direct sequels (though Wicked will assuredly soar into the top 10 by year’s end, breaking the sequel spell). But it’s not just the big franchise plays that have seen success in the latter half of the year. Worldwide, smaller and indie films like Neon’s Anora ($21 million), Mubi’s The Substance ($54 million), Focus Feature’s papal thriller Conclave ($30 million) and A24’s We Live in Time ($30 million) have all done great business for non-franchise fare. As far as Hollywood’s concerned, that’s just gravy.

It’s not quite Christmas yet, but Amazon is putting cash in the stocking of its favorite AI startup and then maybe a lump of coal in Nvidia’s. 

Anthropic announced that it has raised a fresh $4 billion from Amazon, its biggest backer. This brings Amazon’s total investment in the startup to $8 billion, and crucially, this new cash is intended to help Anthropic shape the in-house semiconductor chips that Amazon is working hard to perfect so it can take a crack at Nvidia’s market dominance.

Playing Catch-up

What OpenAI is to Microsoft, Anthropic is to Amazon. Both tech giants have staked their future in the generative AI industry on huge strategic investments into startups. Microsoft has been the most open-handed with its cash: At last count, it had invested a total of $13 billion in OpenAI, but Amazon is closing that gap with its latest funding of Anthropic.

Anthropic says that despite forking over mountains of cash, Amazon remains a minority investor. But that doesn’t stop Amazon from embedding Anthropic’s tech into its own, and vice versa:

• In a press release on Friday, Amazon said the investment was designed to “deepen strategic collaboration” with Anthropic, which includes a provision that Anthropic will use Amazon’s cloud service AWS as its “primary training partner.”
• The newly deepened partnership also means that Anthropic will be helping Amazon’s chip subsidiary, Annapurna Labs, build its “Trainium” semiconductor chips.

Antitrust Ricochet: Amazon isn’t the only Big Tech giant with a stake in Anthropic. Google has sunk $2 billion into the company as well, but the US Department of Justice could unwind that deal as part of its broader antitrust case against Google’s search product, Bloomberg reported last week.