China's Green Policy

We're all familiar with the issue of global warming. We've seen its effects already through polar bears trapped on floating ice blocks as well as the growing number of dead sea life washing up on shores around the world. For the average westerner, this is enough to motivate them to "go green" and start saving electricity and fuel. But in China, many people are still living in 3rd world conditions. Things like global warming don't matter to them. The poorest of the Chinese will work hard to feed themselves and their families, regardless of greenhouses gasses and whatnot. This reason, combined with the booming, super-industrialism of China results in high emissions of greenhouse gasses and damage to the environment. That is why China came up with a simple but possibly very effective solution to this problem. The government introduced "CO2 quotas", a system in which if you emit C02 exceeding your allowed amount you have to buy more "quota" or plant trees. Not a very elegant solution on the surface, but the average person won't have much of a problem keeping their C02 emissions under the quota. The impact lies in big business. Large companies who emit large amounts of C02 will regularly exceed their quota. Obviously, you won't see such companies like Boeing going around and planting trees, so their solution is to "buy" those trees from the average, poor Chinese farmer mentioned above. Now we see why this solution is plausible; large companies will be pressured to emit less Co2 at the same time that the lower class Chinese will be motivated to plant more trees, resulting in a "greener" China.