Explain this to me. The White House opposed the notion of global warming and/or the Kyoto Treaty because doing something about it and/or enforcing the treaty would “adversely affect business”. But if you take a stance like the Kyoto Treaty and create a market for carbon, aren’t you creating new business?
I’m not really sure who loses here. Oh sure, the fat cats in Carson’s Crazy Coal factory have to rewrite their business plans. But is that the only reason? If so, then someone’s not getting their money’s worth from whatever MBAs they have lying around.
Oh, our president is a failed MBA. Crap, there goes that zinger of an argument.
(As a point of interest, The Economist tackled something like this: Picking winners or making markets?)
Adam Keys is typing 
In fact, there are plenty of companies/NGO’s that have developed new markets that all somehow relate to carbon. For instance, I work for a company which offers carbon offsetting.
Indeed, I was very pleased when Expedia gave me the option to buy carbon offsets for a flight. Pat, can you inform me on what actually happens to the proceeds of buying carbon offsets? Are they used to purchase the credits in observers of Kyoto?
Well this one can’t be answered in just a few lines. There are several different “business models”. For instance myclimate.org, the NGO I work for, uses the offsets to support different projects all over the world such as windmills in Madagaskar or bio gas plants in India. Of course some money is used to pay the employees (e.g. the insanley good rails programmers creating customers platforms). Then there are companies that issue quality certificates for these projects. The list goes on.
Here (http://myclimate.org/index.php?lang=en&m=project) you can find a list of myclimates projects.