Carbon is an indicator element, a pervasively active compound, with variable rates of turn around, and a new means of financing cleaner, healthier, more efficient economies.
The element carbon [C] "formed in a star whenever three helium nuclei collide at one spot within less than a million millionth of a second. Every carbon atom in every living creature has been formed by such a wildly improbable collision."
Jacob Bronowski, Ascent of Man.
Carbon cycle | cap and trade | criticisms | terms | what global warming is | what can you do?
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Because the carbon cycle is central to so many natural respiratory, and industrial combustion processes, it enables 
us to fabricate a systematic way
to measure and estimate efficiencies of exchange among all those who use natural resources, pollute the air, or restore vegetation. By creating a means of comparing presently not comparable activities, carbon, as a form of currency could be used to relate the costly means to clean up air and water, or promoting reforestation and
reuse of renewable fuels and materials to the lucrative generation of electricity or the manufacture of goods and the transportation of goods and services around the world.
The diagram at the right shows the basic concept of a roof planted with vegetation. Such systems, called a "green roof" are an architectural form that is spreading in Europe and America, in order to reduce the amount of runoff from the bare roof of an otherwise extensive building. The value to reducing water runoff into lakes, rivers and streams is significant, but with a cap and trade system, or the monetization of carbon any such investment in planting vegetation that absorbs carbon dioxide has an added value. As part of ecological design, the "green roof" alternative is costly in the short-term when compared to tar, shingle, metal or concrete roof materials.
Carbon ought to become the new standard currency for globalization, much as gold became a medium of exchange in the Ancient trading system among the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Persians, and Chinese when it was realized that something might be compared in value to the weight of gold.
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The Carbon Cycle makes this compound and its ubiquitous element a key ingredient in the formation of life, inorganic sediments and limestone rocks and fossils. | |
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| Diagram of the movement of carbon: | ||
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| The centrality of carbon as a measure of performance. | ||
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Cap and trade system to reduce heat trapping gas pollution.
Commercial carbon exchanges | Opposition to cap and trade
Cap means to set a limit beyond which emissions may not 
increase. The limitation is based on scientific data about tolerable amounts or the amount of effluent a natural system can assimilate before it is damaged. An allowable limit based on the need to reduce pollution, such as sulfur dioxide, is created below the cap.
Trade means to put in place an exchange system that allows polluters to buy permissions, or credits to purchase if they pollute above the allowable limit or the limitation (cap) based on the assimilative capacity of the resource such as the atmosphere. Experts suggest strict rules to make these markets accessible and functionally effective at driving down excessive carbon dioxide emissions from factories and electrical plants.
Such a cap and trade system exists in sulfur dioxide in the US and in carbon dioxide worldwide, except for the US, the developing world, and Australia. The Netherlands and the U. K. are the principle nations with experience in carbon trading based on an allocation to polluters of a carbon emissions allowance.
So, what is wrong with capping pollutant emissions and trading to adjust for polluted effluent (or Cap and Trade systems) ?
| Pro | Con | Neo Con |
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| Reductions in pollution must occur to avoid physical and biological losses that are dangerous for all of us. | Reductions in pollution must be equal everywhere or else as a global problem the solution is cosmetic. | Privatize the pollution rights to create responsible and accountable regimen where behavior is not unnecessarily restrained or curtailed. |
| Controlling pollution is costly for society. | The cost of pollution is borne by the poor, aged, and infirm for the benefit of the dirtiest and the marginal operators. | Widely dispersed impacts are more tolerable than intense and immediate impacts. Therefore, the widely dispersed impacts are harder to manage than intense and immediate impacts perpetrated by a few number of polluters. |
| Capping pollution manages costs while creating incentives that are flexible to meet the needs of the industry. | The incentive to allow polluters to continue creates "hot spots" that intensify the adverse impacts on disadvantaged communities. | Government interference is always a nuisance that interferes with commerce by a risky picking winners and losers, often inappropriately. |
| Trading will allow for allocation of scarce capacity with overcapacity in some sort of Pareto optimum (equilibrium). This means that corporations will have to options, one the ability to decide and two a choice of either polluting, installing abatement equipment, or buying credits (rights to pollute) from more efficient producers. | Trading grants or allocates private property rights to an environmental asset such as the atmosphere which is a public good that everyone and everything on Earth needs.It must be kept relatively free from pollution. | Trading is an interference in the current free-market exchange based on the significant investments of those influential interests that provide both expertise and venture capital to assure the cheapest fuels and the least costly electricity for the greatest number of consumers. |
| A flexible market solution to reduce air pollution. | The selling of nature to the highest bidder. | An interference with existing allocation of scarce resources. |
Critics of carbon trading suggest it is an inequitable solution creating transnational ecojustice problems.
What's your carbon footprint? Go here to find out.
Pro meaning one is a proponent, or favors the system of cap and trade because it is the "least, worst" alternative of the many means to do what must be done to assure pollution abatement (reduction in amount of toxic effluent [discharges] or carbon pollution).
Con meaning contrary or opposed to the system of capping emissions and trading the right to pollute the environment, or subsections of the living planet.
Neo Con meaning one is not a supporter because as a Neo-conservative who rejects manipulation of the commercial systems now in place for the benefit of those interests with huge investments at stake, the concept of cap and trade interferes with the desired "free trade" of "market" economics.
Commercial carbon exchanges | Opposition to cap and trade
