I don't mean to be too pedantic here, but when you say "Carbon Credits," are you talking about emissions trading, where a fixed amount of carbon emissions are traded within a regulated market framework, or carbon offsets, where you pay to have someone else to reduce emissions so you don't have to?

Emissions trading markets usually involve major polluters and are subject to auditing. The carbon credits mentioned in the writeup are simply the currency in which the emissions trading market functions. Whether or not emissions trading is the best way to address climate change is up for debate, but you could hardly call it a load of bunk, unless you're one who doesn't believe that climate change is happening at all.

Carbon offsets, on the other hand, usually aren't subject to the same oversight, so there's good reason to be skeptical. While it's possible for carbon offset companies to buy and sell credits on the major markets (thereby taking a certain number of credits "out of circulation"), most of them buy and sell from entities whose emissions aren't covered by market audits. This can lead to all sorts of dodgy accounting, which we've seen exposed repeatedly over the past year or so - offset brokers taking credit for emissions that would have happened regardless of their involvement, or paying the carbon "sellers" much less than they're charging the "buyers," etc.

Anyhow, you can slag on carbon trading all you want, but just make sure that you know what you're slagging.

-secretpath

Everything that needs to be said has already been said, but since no one was listening, we must begin again. -Andre Gide

I imagine it involves slicked back hair, clashing outfits, and gold chains. Possibly gaudy commercials on TV and the sides of buses with your name on it and a catch phrase of some kind.

There is a small, but burgeoning, market for carbon offsets but the math seems to be a bit off.  For less than $100 a year I could fire up my Hummer and blow as much exhaust all over the Delaware Valley as I want and feel no guilt.  Well, I could if I owned a Hummer, so what's the offset for a Lexus ES300?

Anyhow, as the article points out, the producers of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" totalled up the total carbon cost of the film (production & marketing) at about $1,000.  They donated that amount to two eco-friendly operations in Alaska and Pennsylvania.  Of course the donation didn't go far to cover the eco-friendly operations' cost of doing whatever it was they were doing to make us all green all over.  As of last May, the movie had earned $24 million plus at the box office (so sez BoxOfficeMojo), so that $1,000 hardly broke the bank (and was probably factored into the overall cost of the movie).

Illegitimi non carborundum.