It is so easy for people to talk about changes we want to see, complain about them and criticize. But when we can act upon it and pursuit to make the change we actually never do anything. This is what I think happens in Cap and Trade and what we can do to help our world.


Cap and Trade is a new market that controls the carbon that is polluting the atmosphere until we can reach our goal to reduce pollutants. Scientist have shown we have to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere to 350ppm to avoid disasters like drastic changes with climate in our planet. This “new market” has been talked about for about five years. Governments from all around the world have meet to set limits for their respective carbon use. This is the Cap part, which so appears to go really good. When a country needs to buy permits (to pollute), they are required to buy them from other countries that have extra permits. This is when the trading comes in. The buyer pays to pollute while the seller is reducing his emissions. The problem starts here. In my opinion, this isn’t fix anything because the people who pollute are having more opportunities and reasons to continue their pollution. So in other words we are still helping contribute with carbon excess by giving the ones who pollute the opportunity to obtain more permits and keep on polluting. This does not make sense and is crazy! With this market we still haven’t had blooming results, which won’t lead us to any good improvements.


Another problem with Cap and Trade are “ the devil is in the details” that are found in the proposal, that won’t help decrease the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The first one includes free permits. So industrial polluters can get the majority of their permits free, the more pollution, the more permits they can get. Also there are offsets that can get people to cheat and lie but can still make money from them. Lastly there are distractions (the hardest to deal with). Meaning the proposal is actually stopping us from actually reducing carbon, making it a terrible distraction. This are the main points I want to state to show that this market is not helping us in anything and can actually lead us to pollute more which is what we are trying to avoid.


Even though Cap and Trade can be viewed as the first step in finding a solution, we can join together to find new alternatives that truly work so we can all save our only house, the Earth. All of us who live on Earth, can get help from our governments and invent new things like new cleaning energy economies. We can all join to create new plans from different ideas that can be shared with everyone so that we can all be involved and informed to start making changes so we can save our world. In order to see a difference and things actually being done, we have to get together to stop talking about reducing the carbon in the atmosphere and start acting before we are to late.