The carbon trap

The carbon trap: can offsets, emissions caps, and complex trading schemes turn off the global spigot of greenhouse gases?.

Replicating that success is not as straightforward as it sounds. First, carbon emissions are not currently well quantified. The Clean Air Act amendments required power plants to install instruments that record their acid rain-causing emissions and to report the numbers to the Environmental Protection Agency. Yet in Europe's carbon trading system--a likely model for the United States--businesses are not required to use monitoring instrumentation. They are allowed to determine their carbon emissions by "calculation." Although third-party auditors check the process, Michael Wara, a Stanford Law School professor and a researcher at the Stanford Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, acknowledges that there is reason for concern when emitters are doing their own carbon accounting.