I never cease to be amazed at how blind well meaning science minded people are to the unintended consequences of the policies they are encouraged to champion. The big push in Global Warming political circles is to demand legislation to create carbon offset taxes and credits which will be bought and sold globally.
The way it works is polluters must buy carbon offsets (or pay offset taxes) to buy the right to pollute. The offsets are a currency that is bought, sold, loaned, accrues interest, and works just like a bank issued credit card in general principal.
The catch question is who are the polluters? The simple answer - you! You exhale CO2, produce CO2 when heating and cooling your house, your car produces CO2, and the job you work at generates CO2. The legislation being championed would ultimately force you to pay CO2 taxes for anything (including your lungs and your children) that produces CO2.
The precedence that traded carbon offsets creates will be the unleashing of global policy monster that will take on a life of its own far beyond the beneficent purpose originally intended.
All CO2 impact models are based solely on economic productivity. It is important to understand that carbon offset trading is, at its core, a banking system. The currency is economic productivity. Who determines the value of an economy, growth, and distribution of the economy's currency? Who determines who is required to pay in and can take out? Herein lies the danger of creating such a political machine - it requires centralized control of world economies.
The Kyoto Protocol, an international UN and UPCC initiated treaty, is essentially the founding document which proposes global policy regarding CO2 emissions - who can emit and who cannot and to what degree. When we discuss legislation to create a tax and banking system to exchange carbon offsets, we are opening the gates wide open to the creation of financial penalties that will be paid through loss of American productivity and economy while other chief polluters such as China and India get a free pass (as allowed in the Kyoto Protocol). In other words, carbon offset banking proposes to reduce U.S. generated CO2 through the reduction of U.S. industry and jobs and passing the rights to increased industrial productivity to nations who are not held to any limits or standards.
I am in favor of policy that holds polluters accountable in a way that they cannot continue to pollute by buying passes (or given free credits and loans) and deferring the cost to America and other more environmentally responsible countries. Carbon offset trading fails miserably to accomplish anything in the way of genuine environmental improvements. It is, in the final analysis, a system for regulating global economies and the redistribution of national wealth.
Science minded people need to get their heads out of the sand and realize their enthusiasm for environmental programs is being corralled by politicians who have no interest in environmental issues other than the platform it provides for them.