[exe]

Does anyone here have experience in or looked into or know someone who does carbon credit trading? It looks like a potential location independent income source, albeit with a good amount of traveling involved as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credit

The head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital predicts that "Carbon will be the world's biggest commodity market, and it could become the world's biggest market overall."

Several online exchanges have sprung up:

http://www.chicagoclimatex.com

http://www.carbontradexchange.com

http://www.mcex.ca/index_en

And the average Joe Citizen can get into the action:

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/0...mode=print

[Jim Kirk]

The cap & trade system is national suicide - Back in college I won by essay and academic competition various scholoships for seminars put on around the country by free-market think tanks - one of which was really the force behind proposing a cap and trade system for managing industrial/commercial pollutants. Like so many so called free market think tanks - they put one over on us in that they were simply the intellectual arms of corporate pirates - and the carbon cap and trade that is now being proposed is the penultimate fuck of all time on this country and on any industry left that is not in the third-world.

By giving investment banks a 5% commission in effect on all energy traded in the world beyond the amount capped by the government - which for all practical purposes is private industry now - you just further raid whats left of the country. Remember what happened in Cali a few years ago - energy brokers laughing about causing blackouts in part of California - multiply that by a million. Really - cap and traders for anything other than the original intent of the idea - which were corporate entities trading pollution quantity rights among themselves so that pollution would be incurred only for the highest use possible in manufacturing - ought get the hammer dropped on 'em.

[OSL]

I second that - I did an entire module on this in my masters program. While well intentioned, it is massively flawed and there is too much potential for abuse of the system.

There are better ways to prevent air pollution.

[exe]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I think it's obvious that it's a rigged up system by a bunch of smart guys profiting handsomely from it. I'd rather be part of the winner's circle than be a whiny granola-munching treehugger.