Observing The Presidential Candidates Reveals The Next Green Trend

August 13, 2008 · by Scott

Co2 As painful as it may be, following politics can aid you in discovering trends. Politicians help form our future, and knowing their tendencies and beliefs can help you predict that future.

Back in June, I wrote about how both presidential candidates support stem cell research, all but guaranteeing a boom in popularity of the controversial research. There is another trend that they both support: carbon/emission caps.

Carbon caps allow for what is called emissions trading: the trading of carbon credits. Much of the developed world already does this. The U.S. does not.

Yet.

Since our next president will be either McCain or Obama, the likelihood of this happening in the U.S. is quite high. We may even join the Kyoto Protocol.

This niche is loaded with keywords, mostly centered around the word ‘carbon.’ It’s only a matter of time before these words become everyday vocabulary in the U.S.:

Emissions Trading
Carbon Trading
Carbon Footprint
Carbon Credit
Carbon Project
Carbon Finance
Carbon Offsetting
Carbon Tax
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)
Certified Emissions Reductions (CER)

Carbon Credit is the term that I think will hit the biggest.

To put it quite short and simple: companies are allotted a certain amount of carbon emissions; let’s say 100 carbon credits to make this example easy. If Comcast “uses up” only 78 of those 100 carbon credits, they can “sell off” the remaining 22. Now if Exxon uses 114 carbon credits, they will be penalized/taxed for going over the 100 limit. However, they can avoid the penalty by purchasing carbon credits from Comcast to bring their total back down to 100.

The idea is to encourage companies to improve their carbon footprint and make money by selling off those surplus carbon credits.

Like I said, other countries already do this. But like anything else, once it hits the States, it will be huge.

Subscribe to TrendDomaining.com using your favorite reader!

If you like this article, please let people know: