It seems to be a good day for news that fits both my work and my blog. This time the subject is carbon emissions trading.

The general idea of this is quite simple – businesses get permits to emit a certain amount of CO2, which they can either use or sell. A forward thinking company might reduce its emissions levels and pay for that effort by selling the permits it doesn’t need. A lazy company might choose to buy extra permits and not worry about emissions. But as time goes on the number of permits available gets reduced, so the price of permits goes up, and everyone is encouraged to reduce emissions.

That works fine provided that the number of permits initially available matches actual levels of emissions. In practice, however, the EU emissions trading scheme has rather more permits available than European businesses need, so the price of permits is quite low, and companies are not much bothered about them. However, permits are available on the open market. What is more, a single permit is quite cheap – currently around €23. There are millions of these things in existence, but they are cheap enough that you or I could afford to buy some.

Why would we do that? Well, because if we own them, then businesses don’t, so the amount of carbon they can emit is reduced. Furthermore, if we take permits out of circulation then the price of other permits in the market will go up. The only trouble is that your average European doesn’t know much about emissions trading. To solve that problem, a group of climate campaigners have set up Sandbag, an organization that exists to help ordinary people buy up emissions permits and take them out of the market. Sandbag also intends to campaign to encourage companies to voluntarily give up permits, and to encourage the EU to reduce the number in circulation.

As well as being interested in this from a professional angle, I’m also fascinated by the idea of using the Internet to mobilize large numbers of people in an attempt to influence a very large market. It is a form of grass roots capitalist activism. I will be interested to see how it goes. Let me know if you decide to sign up.