Question about carbon credits?

Thank you for pointing out numerous aspects of the ridiculousness of carbon credits. It may work between countries or corporations, but individuals and their carbon credits is a joke.

Carbon credits are an idea proposed by polluting businesses that don’t want to pay to decrease their pollution or use processes that create pollution and can’t change from that. They were created in response to treaties like the Kyoto Protocol. By law and the EPA US business are only allowed to produce so much greenhouse gases based on several factors. They are traded on the Chicago Climate Exchange and the European Climate Exchange in a fashion similar to how commodities are traded. Some plants create a lot of greenhouse gases because the process is a pollution generating one and it is harder (more expensive) to clean up the process like a coal fired power plant. So the business looks to the exchange to find extra pollution credits to avoid paying penalties and fines to the EPA. A factory that only assembles parts to create its goods produces less greenhouse gases so they have extra credits that they can put up on the exchange. When those credits are sold they get paid, and they don’t have to try and find a business to buy them. As a homeowner or small business owner you don’t have a limit on the amount of greenhouse gases you can produce so you don’t have any credits to sale. Basically you are too small scale. Trading Carbon Credits is only for greenhouse gas production, not any other type of pollution and in my opinion they are basically a legal way to cheat. Instead of converting the coal fired power plant to burning natural gas and instead of installing more filters or creating a process that burns more of the waste gases the power plant simply goes on creating greenhouse gases and buys Carbon Credits so it can go on with business as usual.