Saturday, January 16, 2010

Benefits And Drawbacks Of Carbon Trading

By Demy Oswald

Considering the increasing concern about global warming and greater carbon emissions into the air, governments and other agencies are looking for viable alternatives to lower pollution. Among several strategies for dealing with this issue, carbon trading and carbon offset have been widely accepted.

Businesses buy carbon credits that are available in the market in the carbon trading model. The credits allow businesses to go beyond their prescribed quota of greenhouse gas emissions and not face the burden of a penalty for doing so.

The basic benefit of the carbon trading method is that it rewards lowering of emissions. The objective is to make organizations realize that the price of carbon credits is a lot more than the expenditure on opting for eco-friendly ways of doing business. If the company is forced to bear the costs of damage to the environment then it will resort to practices that are eco friendly to score over its competitors. As more and more companies opt for this approach, the total emission levels across the world will decrease gradually, thus protecting the environment.

Another significant benefit of carbon trading is that it is based on a free market system where any company can buy or sell carbon credits. As a result of non interference from the local administrations such as imposition of fines or creating regional legislations, this system is quite successful.

The greatest drawback however with carbon trading is that an international framework for trading is not in place. Since most of the trade in carbon credits happens in the global market, it is difficult for regional enterprises to make use of this system.

A few companies are unwilling to adopt this system, as they do not want to incur costs that cannot be transferred to their products' end buyers. In addition, it is quite difficult for small companies to get the sophisticated machinery or devise innovative means to reduce the amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by them. As a result, the smaller companies are forced to continuously buy carbon credits in this system which leads to decreasing of their capability to compete with larger corporations.

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