The Carbon Trading Scheme Explained

Economic Geography Essay

The Carbon Trading Scheme is a scheme used by countries that overproduce carbon emissions, which they buy carbon emission permits from developing countries with a forested area called “sinks”, this way countries can offset their carbon footprint and continue to produce more carbon emissions on behalf of a low producing country. This way production continues and whatever additional costs paid are added to the cost of production which the consumer accounts for.

• The reliability of baseline measures. While carbon dioxide is relatively easy to measure and account for, other sources of more potent greenhouse gases such as methane are less well understood and so baseline measurements are uncertain. .

• The difficulties of continuous monitoring: Climate change is caused by multiple gases and they come from many different sources. The problem of measuring all sources with countries with limited capabilities poses as an obstacle.

• The allocation of permits when markets are first created. Establishing a brand new market requires decisions to be made about how many pollution permits will be assigned to individual firms before the trading begins.

I think it contributes to more to industrial sustainability on behalf of the environment, even though the carbon trade scheme contributes to the preservation of forests because they are seen as assets worth keeping, more carbon emissions is being released to the atmosphere which leads to climate change and the damage of nature. While its very difficult to keep track of emissions and the damage of the gasses emitted are still unknown I think the criticism to the carbon trading scheme are valid and should be reviewed. But as we have learned developing countries and producing countries are both involved in the scheme so the blame is on both of the countries and more strict steps should be taken to ensure the protection of natural assets regardless of profit.

- Economic Geography: A Contemporary Introduction

Neil M.Coe - Philip F.Kelly - Henry Wai-Chung.Yeung - Wiley-Blackwell - 2013