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Carbon trading is back in focus, much to the delight of the many carbon-related companies on Aim.

By Josephine MouldsPublished: 5:35PM BST 20 Sep 2009
In between the fiery debates about health care, the US Senate is discussing a carbon emissions trading scheme, which would limit the amount of carbon that companies can emit.
Under such a scheme, if companies choose to exceed those limits, they must buy carbon offsets, known as Certified Emission Reduction certificates (CERs), which trade like a commodity on specialised exchanges.

Last year the price of a certificate to offset a tonne of carbon was around €25 (£22). It then plunged to a low of €8 and has gradually climbed back up again to €15.
Neil Eckert, chief executive of Climate Exchange, a trading exchange for environmental financial products, points out that this roughly follows the trajectory of the oil price, which reached a high of $150 (£92) a barrel only to fall to $40, climbing up to trade around $70 in recent weeks.
The two commodities are driven by the same factors. As companies use less oil, they emit less carbon, and so require fewer carbon offsets.
But carbon, unlike oil, is a very new and immature market. The introduction of an emissions trading scheme in the US would signify a major leap forward in its development.
The US is one of the few industrialised nations that did not sign up to the Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement to reduce emissions that has spawned emissions trading schemes across the world. The largest is currently in Europe but that would be dwarfed by a US scheme.
Mike Wilkins, head of carbon markets at Standard & Poor's, says it is 50/50 whether the Senate will pass the bill: "We are in the middle of an economic downturn. The appetite among large industry players and lobby groups to incur more costs and cut emissions is pretty low, but there is a very strong political will to bring the US in line with the rest of the world."
This is all happening as environmental companies gear up for the global climate change conference in Copenhagen this December.
These conferences happen every year but Copenhagen is particularly significant. It is seen as the last chance to renew the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
The goal is to get rich nations to sign up to deeper emissions cuts than the 20pc agreed under Kyoto, while offering greater assistance to developing countries to help them curb greenhouse gas pollution.
The way they can currently do this is by the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which sees companies in developed countries pay for carbon reduction programmes in developing countries in exchange for the carbon offsets. That framework expires with Kyoto, meaning there is considerable uncertainty regarding the future of the carbon markets beyond 2012.