Carbon trading: dirty, sexy money
There's little doubt that free-market capitalism helped to get us into the mess we're in. As Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, puts it: climate change is "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen". The question now is whether capitalism is able to make amends. Can it provide a mechanism that rewards people for reducing their carbon emissions instead of increasing them? Or will it simply give big polluters a way of dodging their responsibilities?