Sounds to me like he's got the idea but missed the point. Industry-wide carbon trading was hardly a success - was it? More CO2 emissions across Europe as a result!

Just how much is this headline-generating scheme going to cost to set up and run and wouldn't that money be better used to fund energy efficiency projects or similar?

The government should be forcing people to take responisbility for their actions. We need to set an example to the rest of the world. Carbon credit cards are the way o go.

We only have one planet!

Thanks for your comments - scepticism of the process of carbon trading is a respectable position, based on the lack of hard experience with carbon trading, and the unhappy experiences of the early days of the EU ETS. To counter that let me add an explanation of the rationale behind carbon trading:

By setting an overall cap on licenses to emit carbon, and subsequently reducing them year-on-year, economic pressures can be created on the least efficient processes - as the number of "spare" permissions drops the scarcity leads to their cost increasing, and the incentive for the polluter to clean up increases until simple economics makes it cheaper to take whatever measures are necessary to stop polluting. The model of carbon trading does not require that the permits are set at the correct level from day one, but that there is a sustained progress to the eventual target - an overly generous initial allocation delays but does not prevent the achievement of the final goal. An additional and crucial part of a trading scheme of this nature is that it can be extended between countries, and thus bring about the necessary global reductions in greenhouse gas production.

The obvious example of a successful emissions trading scheme would be the US sulphur dioxide reductions brought about as a result of the emissions trading introduced in the 1990 Clean Air Act, which is widely acknowledged to have been highly successful. Perhaps another example would be the UK landfill tax - by imposing and additional cost on landfill, significant reductions in waste disposal and increases in recycling rates have been achieved.

The potential success of carbon trading requires:

Global (or near-global) implementation. Large-scale carbon emissions outside the trading "zone" would seriously undermine the whole scheme - imposing costs on manufacturing within the zone and leading to simple displacement of carbon-producing manufacturing to the non-regulated zone. At some point very significant pressures on non-compliant regions would need to be applied. This forms part of the second requirement:

Concerted and sustained political will. Pressures will be applied for "relaxations" and "exemptions". Pressures to defer year-on-year planned reductions will need to be resisted. The effectiveness of the scheme will depend utterly on politicians maintaining a long-term squeeze on permits, with a necessity for personal carbon production to be squeezed as well. This explains the significance of David Milliband discussing carbon credit cards - clearly the government wishes to send a message that they are willing to tackle some of the difficult issues that are key to the success of a carbon trading regime.

Clear and effective accounting practices. The process of monitoring the permits will need to be credible and effective, and the pressures to use "innovative accounting" to subvert the trading scheme will need to be addressed - and as the regime bites harder, the subversive pressures become more intense. There are many who would regard carbon sequestration and tree-planting schemes as perhaps the first of many attempts to avoid the necessity of reducing carbon emissions.

Hopefully this provides a little more background into the article, in which I have tried to give a fair explanation of some of the issues. However I am not a policy expert or official spokesperson, and would welcome any further comments (and corrections) from the cluster.

This explains the significance of David Milliband discussing carbon credit cards - clearly the government wishes to send a message that they are willing to tackle some of the difficult issues that are key to the success of a carbon trading regime.

I'm sorry, but I can't accept that. We need more than "messages" and the idea that airlines can now make a huge profit and increase their flights by being brought in to the scheme show it up for the nonsense that it is.

None of this has anything to do with reducing CO2.