Alternative Fuels

The topic of carbon credits seems to become more newsworthy every day. For more information, Wikipedia already has articles about Carbon Credits and Personal Carbon Trading.

For someone to be issued a credit for something, my understanding is that someone else needs to own it first. From what I can tell, governments issue carbon credits to businesses and individuals and then assign a carbon cost or quota on greenhouse-gas activities. I have trouble understanding how many credits should be issued and how one would go about assigning carbon quotas. Beside the UK and the EU, I am not aware of anyone else actively trading carbon credits.

Is carbon credit trading a realistic way to reduce greenhouse gases?

The system isnt really working, since the estimation for the quota's was excessive and nobody actually needs the carbon credits. Since the introduction of the system, they have depreciated a lot.

If no-one actually needed the credits, was there any incentive for anyone to use them or was this to be done on a voluntary basis?

The quotums were wrongly estimated, so almost every company already has credits in excess.

The quotums were wrongly estimated, so almost every company already has credits in excess.

Yep..once again we see politicians being ruled by big business...
It just makes thing worse.
These politicians are on the right bandwagon, shame they dont have the backbone to put their salaries where their mouth is.